Performance in First-Person 3D Shooters

Battlefield 2

The Radeon X800 architecture has spent its reserves and doesn’t look well anymore in games that abound in advanced shader-based effects. The 16-pipelined card from PowerColor can only challenge the GeForce 6800 GS in 1600x1200 with or without full-screen antialiasing. It is slower, sometimes much slower, than the Nvidia card in all the other cases.

At the “eye candy” settings and in low resolutions the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 is also slower than the Radeon X1600 XT although the latter has only four texture-mapping units (TMUs – the X800 GTO 16 has as many as 16!). Talking about playability, the PowerColor card delivers a comfortable average frame rate in 1280x1024 without full-screen antialiasing and in 1024x768 with FSAA and anisotropic filtering turned on.

The Chronicles of Riddick

The PowerColor X800 GTO 16 can only keep on the same level with the GeForce 6800 in this game – the GeForce 6800 with slower memory than recommended by Nvidia. The game is playable in 1024x768 resolution only, without full-screen antialiasing. These results are not to be wondered at because the OpenGL-using game engine that makes wide use of stencil shadows has a strong predilection towards Nvidia’s GeForce 6/7 cards.