X-bit labs

PowerColor X700 PRO Graphics Card Review (page 10)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin

[ 02/09/2005 | 12:42 PM ]

Half-Life 2

Those levels of Half-Life 2 that have the word “canals” in their name are all about racing in a speedboat across water, so it is the pixel pipelines that bear the biggest load here. The advantage here is certainly with those graphics cards that know to process complex mathematical calculations used to create water surfaces in games. To spice up the situation we enabled the Reflect All option. The hero of this review is in its element here and easily leaves the GeForce 6600 GT 20-25% behind.

The X700 PRO is ahead of its main competitor in the “eye candy” mode, too, but the gap is smaller now because the memory on the PowerColor card works at a lower frequency.

The second demo we use is a street fighting scene that mostly loads the central processor of the computer. That’s why all the participating cards are on the same level of performance here.

This uniformity is somewhat broken as we enable full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering: the PowerColor X700 PRO is slightly faster than the GeForce 6600 GT.