Performance in Third Person 3D Shooters

Prince of Persia: Warrior Within

Even though RADEON X1300 PRO shows practically the same fillrate as RADEON X700 in a scene with a lot of textures (you shouldn’t forget that the latter also suffers from some texture caching issues), its performance in Prince of Persia is quite poor: it falls more than by 40% behind the competitor in 1600x1200. It is probably the fact that it features only two vertex processors against 3 vertex processors of GeForce 6600, even though the latter works at lower frequencies.

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory supports Shader Model 3.0, and in this mode the image quality is much higher than in SM 1.1 and SM 2.0. Of course, you have to sacrifice something for the sake of great visual quality that is why RADEON X1300 PRO processing pixel shaders 3.0 yields to RADEON X700 working in a lighter mode. The performance difference as we can see is about 20%-25%. In eye candy mode the gap shrinks to less than 10% difference. Note that the performance of competing ATI solutions remains quite high for comfortable gaming even though the best performance margin still belongs to RADEON X700.