X-bit labs

ATI Introduces DirectX 9 and PCI Express to Value Graphics Market: PowerColor X300SE Graphics Card Review (page 8)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin

[ 10/20/2004 | 04:34 PM ]

Far Cry

With its high-resolution textures and numerous pixel shaders, this 3D shooter requires high texturing speed (and, accordingly, high graphics memory bandwidth) and fast pixel shader execution. This beautiful game is hard on the graphics subsystem of your computer – the RADEON X600 PRO was the only participating graphics card to maintain a frames-per-second rate of 26 and higher. The rest of the devices, and the PowerColor X300 SE among them, have much lower results.

Even the RADEON X600 XT cannot provide playability at the maximum settings of Far Cry, since the performance would bottom out to 15fps and lower. Like Doom 3, this game belongs to the new generation, and the poor performance of the low-end graphics cards shouldn’t come as a surprise. To say something good about the PowerColor X300 SE – it shows the speed of the GeForce PCX 5750 in this game, although the latter belongs to a higher class of products.

Painkiller

The mystical game Painkiller is a nice exception among the crowd of first-person 3D shooters. The game is visually appealing, but its well-designed engine is capable of working fast even on low-end graphics cards, including the PowerColor X300 SE. This card subjectively provides a playable fps rate even in 1280x1024. In 1600x1200, and in the eye candy mode, the new card is hindered by its 64-bit memory and the fps rate sometimes falls below the comfortable level. The effect from overclocking is also small in the last case since it is the memory subsystem speed that mostly affects the performance of a graphics card in modes with full-screen antialiasing and anisotropic filtering.