Serious Sam 2

Shaders from Serious Sam 2 work actively with textures, some shaders with as many as 7-8 textures. This is why the main performance-limiting factor for the Radeon X1600 XT is the insufficient number of TMUs. That explanation doesn’t work for the PowerColor X800 GTO 16, however, which performs poorly, too. As we already wrote, this problem may result from inefficient graphics memory distribution in the ATI Catalyst driver as it doesn’t show up with senior graphics card models from the Radeon X1000 family equipped with 512MB of memory. On the other hand, even the two times faster GeForce 6800 GS delivers a mere 48fps in 1024x768 with a minimum of 19-20fps. We are afraid owners of this graphics card will have to reduce the game quality settings, too.

Unreal Tournament 2004

As always, the speed ceiling goes lower for graphics cards on GPUs from ATI Technologies in Unreal Tournament 2004. It doesn’t prevent the PowerColor card from yielding over 70fps in 1600x1200 with turned-on FSAA and anisotropic filtering, though. This is more than enough to enjoy this still quite popular 3D shooter.