X-bit labs

PowerColor X1950 Pro Extreme Graphics Card: Sacred Silence (page 8)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 12/19/2006 | 03:39 PM ]

Far Cry

There is no big difference between the PowerColor X1950 Pro Extreme and the GeForce 7900 GS in 1280x1024, but the Nvidia card can barely give out a comfortable frame rate in 1600x1200. It is ATI’s Radeons that dominate in 1920x1200 as they have a higher GPU clock rate and a more efficient memory controller.

The GeForce 7900 GS is on the losing side from the beginning on the Research map because its 20 pixel processors working at 450MHz cannot match the 36 processors of the Radeon X1950 Pro and Radeon X1900 GT. The overclocked Radeon X1950 Pro isn’t much faster than ATI’s reference card – they differ by no more than 3fps, although the speed of processing pixel shaders, which depends directly on the GPU clock rate, is a crucial factor in this test.

Note that the resolution of 1920x1200 is unavailable for owners of GeForce 7900 GS, not to mention GeForce 7600 GT, due to low performance provided by these cards.

The game’s FP HDR mode can be used in practice on Radeon X1950 Pro and PowerColor X1950 Pro Extreme graphics cards, but only in resolutions not higher than 1280x1024. The speed would be too low in the higher display modes.

This doesn’t refer to the GeForce 7900 GS, which provides a near-comfortable frame rate on the Research map, but fails to cope with the increased load on the Pier level that is all about open spaces with lots of vegetation and water.