Serious Sam 2

Just like all ATI Radeon graphics cards with 256 megabytes of memory, the PowerColor X1900 GT isn’t brilliant in Serious Sam 2 when the game’s highest graphics quality settings are selected. The card yields an average frame rate of less than 30fps even in 1024x768. The GeForce 7900 GT has an average speed of 45fps, but its min speed is only 5fps which is far from comfortable. This means that graphics cards with 256MB of onboard memory are not suitable for Serious Sam 2, at least if you want to use the highest graphics quality settings and FSAA. Note also that the GeForce 7900 GT is again ahead of the new card from ATI thanks to its 24 TMUs.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

We do not benchmark this game with FSAA because the GeForce 7 series doesn’t support full-screen antialiasing along with HDR. And we do not want to test without HDR because it makes the game much more beautiful.

The graphics card is expected to quickly process pixel shaders, shadows and lighting in Oblivion’s closed environments. The PowerColor X1900 GT leaves the Radeon X1800 XT 512MB far behind, but has a little lower average performance than the GeForce 7900 GT in resolutions above 1024x768. On the other hand, its minimum performance is always higher than that of the Nvidia solution because it has more pixel processors (36 against 24) which are also clocked at a higher frequency.

If you use the PowerColor X1900 GT (or any other version of the Radeon X1900 GT) in 1280x1024, you can be sure the frame rate will never sink below 30fps, which guarantees smooth game play. And if you lower the resolution to 1024x768, you can have an average performance of over 60fps which is comfortable for any 3D shooter.

The 24 TMUs of the GeForce 7900 GT come into play in the game’s open scenes, and this card has a higher average speed than the Radeon X1900 GT. However, the latter provides a considerably higher minimum speed. We guess having a min speed of 32fps and an average speed of 19fps is better for the gamer than 37/12fps, so this round seems to be won by ATI Technologies’ solution.

TES IV: Oblivion doesn’t have integrated benchmarking options, so we had to test it manually with Fraps. The results may be somewhat inaccurate as a consequence.