X-bit labs

Almost a Champion: ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT Gaming Performance Review (page 9)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko, Anton Shilov

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

Performance in Third-Person 3D Shooters

Hitman: Blood Money

This seems to be another indicator of existing defects in the Catalyst driver for the ATI Radeon HD 2000 series. With all its superiority in technical characteristics, the results of the Radeon HD 2900 XT differ from those of the Radeon X1950 XTX, but only for the worse. The speed is high for playing the game in 1280x1024, but that’s not quite what you’d expect from a newest top-class 700-million-transistor graphics processor with a power draw of over 160 watts!

Tomb Raider: Legend

The Radeon HD 2900 XT isn’t brilliant in this game because the Next Generation Content mode requires high speed of texturing besides sheer computing power. There can’t be any competition with the GeForce 8800 GTX that has two times the number of TMUs and 1.5 times the number of ROPs that are clocked at just a slightly lower frequency. The new card from AMD accomplishes its main purpose of rivaling the GeForce 8800 GTS quite successfully, though, being no more than 11% behind in the worst case (in 1600x1200).

Splinter Cell: Double Agent

We try to get the best quality of graphics from each game, so we chose HDR in favor of FSAA (these features work incorrectly in this game when enabled simultaneously) and benchmarked the cards with anisotropic filtering only.

The Splinter Cell game series traditionally uses a lot of special effects with complex mathematical computations and Double Agent follows suit. The results are indicative of comparable computing capacities of the Radeon HD 2900 XT and GeForce 8800 GTX. These two cards are roughly equals, the AMD being somewhat better in 1280x1024 and the Nvidia in 1600x1200. Both cards provide maximum playing comfort. Unfortunately, the game does not support widescreen resolutions.