X-bit labs

PowerColor X700 PRO Graphics Card Review (page 22)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin

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

The second test is closer to role-play games than to any other gaming genres. There’s a lot of dynamically generated vegetation in the scene that depicts a night forest, plus numerous light & shadow special effects.

The results of this round resemble those of the first test: there’s a gap of about 1fps between the GeForce 6600 GT and the RADEON X700 PRO, but that’s quite a lot considering that their absolute speeds are about 5-10fps.

When full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering are on, the PowerColor X700 PRO has almost the same speed as the GeForce 6600 GT; the difference of 0.2fps lies within the measurement error range.

3DMark05’s third game test can hardly be fitted into the confines of any particular genre. The action is going on outdoors and the load on the pixel pipelines is the highest here: the water surface and the walls of the canyon are all created with the help of mind-bogglingly complex pixel shaders.

The PowerColor X700 PRO is a little behind the GeForce 6600 GT. The lack of the GPU frequency is felt acutely here: the RADEON X700 XT whose core is clocked at a 50MHz higher frequency even overtakes the NVIDIA card.

The “eye candy” mode is more favourable for ATI’s cards. The PowerColor and the GeForce 6600 GT match each other. All in all, considering its reduced frequencies, the PowerColor card performs sufficiently fast in 3DMark05. When overclocked, the PowerColor delivers you the performance of a RADEON X700 XT.