Performance in First Person 3D Shooters

Call of Duty

This game is among the simplest in our set of benchmarking applications. Since complex pixel shaders do not live here, the texturing speed becomes vitally important – and it is closely connected to the graphics memory bandwidth. The low result of the PowerColor X300 SE shouldn’t be any surprise considering its using a 64-bit bus to communicate with its memory. The card even fell behind the RADEON 9200, which is a representative of an obsolete architecture, but features a 128-bit memory bus. It is only through overclocking that the PowerColor is capable of overtaking the 9200 model.

When full-screen antialiasing is enabled, the 64-bit bus becomes the bottleneck that prevents the PowerColor from showing any advantages of the X300 architecture. Overclocking helps to catch up with the 9200, again.

Doom 3

Doom 3 is a hungry consumer of all system resources of your PC; it is definitely not for systems with low-end graphics cards, so the poor results of the PowerColor X300 SE are quite natural. The performance grows somewhat in the Low Quality mode, but not enough for a comfortable play, while all the reduced-size textures of this mode often look rather ugly.

The PowerColor card turns in a better result on the d3dm4 map which is intended for multiplayer. Anyway, this performance is still not enough for you to have a comfortable play. Well, it’s hard to expect anything better from an entry-level device because Doom 3 belongs to the latest generation of PC games.