X-bit labs

The Mass Market Warrior: ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4 Review (page 14)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko, Anton Shilov

[ 09/28/2007 | 10:56 PM ]

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

The game doesn’t support FSAA when you enable the dynamic lighting model, but loses much of its visual appeal with the static model. This is the reason why we benchmarked the cards in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. using anisotropic filtering only.

ATI Radeon HD 2000 series cards behave rather oddly in this popular game. When tested in a settlement, a not very demanding part of the game, the new cards have very low performance for their class, sometimes being slower than ATI’s previous-generation products even.

This is what we see here: the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4 is far slower than the GeForce 8600 GTS and, at 1280x1024, than the GeForce 8600 GT as well. All the cards are dramatically slower than the ATI Radeon X1950 Pro, which is not itself a champion when it comes to running S.T.A.L.K.E.R.