X-bit labs

Almost a Champion: ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT Gaming Performance Review (page 10)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko, Anton Shilov

[ 05/24/2007 | 03:39 PM ]

Performance in RPG

Gothic 3

The current version of Gothic 3 does not support FSAA, so we benchmarked the cards using anisotropic filtering only.

The average speed of the Radeon HD 2900 XT is comparable to that of the Radeon X1950 XTX in every resolution, but the minimum of speed is somewhat higher due to the higher core frequency. Perhaps an insufficient amount of texture filter units prevents the new AMD architecture from showing its full potential. From a practical standpoint, the Radeon HD 2900 XT allows playing this game at 1280x1024 while the GeForce 8800 GTS provides a comfortable speed in 1600x1200, too.

Neverwinter Nights 2

Starting with version 1.04, the game allows using FSAA, but its support for HDR is still deficient. Therefore we tested the cards at the eye candy settings.

Like its predecessor, the AMD Radeon HD 2900 XT does not provide an acceptable speed in any of the tested resolutions. This may be the consequence of the new GPU design with only 16 TMUs and 16 ROPs that doesn’t match the NWN 2 game engine well. The game is very sensitive to the amount of those subunits as you can see by comparing the GeForce 8800 GTX and GTS, especially in high resolutions.