Performance in First Person 3D Shooters

Battlefield 2

Since RADEON X1300 PRO is a budget solution, we shouldn’t expect it to perform very fast with enabled full-screen anti-aliasing. Therefore, for the eye candy mode we will consider only the 1024x768 resolution.

Wow, the testing session has just started and the results we see are simply impressive! RADEON X1300 PRO managed to provide acceptable performance in Battlefield 2 even in 1280x1024 letting only RADEON X700 get ahead. And all this was possible with only 4 pixel processors! Of course, the clock frequencies did have their effect here: RADEON X1300 PRO works at 600MHz chip and 400 (800) MHz memory frequency, while by RADEON X700 these numbers are 400MHz and 350 (700) MHz respectively. The same picture can be observed in eye candy mode: RADEON X700 is the leader here and RADEON X1300 PRO follows close behind him, yielding only 4fps to the winner. You can play just fine in this mode, however the performance will definitely drop below 30fps in “heavy” scenes. Note that unlike RADEON X1600, our today’s hero, RADEON X1300 PRO, looks much better balanced: it boasts 4 TMUs per 4 pixel processors. So, the only bottleneck of this solution can be the 2 vertex processors. However, high working frequencies should actually make up a little bit for so few vertex processors onboard.