X-bit labs

ATI Radeon X1650 XT Graphics Card Review (page 14)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 01/19/2007 | 11:58 AM ]

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

The Nvidia GeForce 7 architecture doesn’t permit to use FP16 HDR along with full-screen antialiasing, but without HDR the game loses much of its visual appeal. That’s why we test the cards here with anisotropic filtering only.

In closed environments, houses and dungeons, the Radeon X1650 XT and GeForce 7600 GT deliver similar performance, but the Radeon offers a higher minimum of speed, which makes it preferable for playing this game.

The Radeon X1650 XT has a bigger advantage in open scenes. Although the two opponents have comparable GPU and memory frequencies and the same amount of ROPs, the AMD card features a ring-bus controller (it minimizes memory access latencies), uses improved invisible surface removal algorithms, and has more pixel and vertex processors than the opponent. This is all called for in this game, so it’s no wonder the Radeon X1650 XT is only slower than the higher-class products in this test, which is one of the most difficult on our list.

Well, the speed of the Radeon X1650 XT isn’t high by itself, yet its opponent is even slower. So, the choice is obvious here.