Testbed and Methods

We compared ATI Radeon X1950 Pro and Nvidia GeForce 7900 GS graphics cards on the following platforms:

• AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 CPU (2x2.60GHz, 2x1MB L2 cache)
• Abit AN8 32X mainboard (nForce4 SLI x16) for Nvidia GeForce cards
• Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe mainboard (ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200) for ATI’s Radeon cards
• OCZ PC-3200 Platinum EL DDR SDRAM (2x1GB, CL2-3-2-5)
• Maxtor MaXLine III 7B250S0 hard disk drive (Serial ATA-150, 16MB buffer)
• Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 sound card
• Enermax Liberty 620W power supply (ELT620AWT)
• Samsung SyncMaster 244T monitor (24”, 1920x1200@75Hz max display mode)
• Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2, DirectX 9.0c
• ATI Catalyst 6.9
• Nvidia ForceWare 91.47

The drivers were set up in such a way as to provide a comparable, yet highest possible texture filtering quality.

ATI Catalyst:

• Catalyst A.I.: Standard
• Mipmap Detail Level: High Quality
• Wait for vertical refresh: Always off
• Adaptive antialiasing: Off
• Temporal antialiasing: Off
• High Quality AF: On
• Other settings: by default

Nvidia ForceWare:

• Texture Filtering: High Quality
• Vertical sync: Off
• Trilinear optimization: Off
• Anisotropic mip filter optimization: Off
• Anisotropic sample optimization: Off
• Gamma correct antialiasing: On
• Transparency antialiasing: Off
• Other settings: by default

We selected the highest possible graphics quality level in each game. We didn’t edit the games’ configuration files. The speed was measured using the game’s integrated tools or, if not available, by means of the Fraps program. We also measured the minimum speed of the cards where possible.

Besides the two standard resolutions of 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 pixels, we also used a resolution of 1920x1200 pixels with an aspect ratio of 16:10 in games supporting widescreen modes. We enabled FSAA and anisotropic filtering from the game’s menu. If this was not possible, we forced them using the appropriate driver settings. We decided not to run any tests with disabled FSAA, because with a $199 graphics card you can hope to get relatively high performance even with FSAA 4x enabled.

We ran the tests with disabled FSAA only for those games that do not support FSAA due to the specifics of their engine or make use of HDR (FP16). The thing is that the GeForce 7 family cannot perform FSAA along with floating-point HDR.

Besides ATI Radeon X1950 Pro and Nvidia GeForce 7900 GS we also tested the following graphics cards:

• Radeon X1900 GT (R580, 575/1200MHz, 36pp, 8vp, 12tmu, 12rop, 256-bit, 256MB)
  http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/powercolor-x1900gt.html
• Radeon X1800 GTO (R520, 500/1000MHz, 12pp, 8vp, 12tmu, 12rop, 256-bit, 256MB)
  http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/powercolor-x1800gto.html
• GeForce 7900 GT (G71, 450/1320MHz, 24pp, 8vp, 24tmu, 16rop, 256-bit, 256MB)
  http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/geforce7900gt.html
• GeForce 7600 GT (G73, 560/1400MHz, 12pp, 5vp, 12tmu, 8rop, 128-bit, 256MB)
  http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/gigabyte-7600gt.html

The following games and applications were used in this test session:

First-person 3D shooters:

• Battlefield 2
• Call of Duty 2
• Far Cry
• F.E.A.R.
• Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter
• Half-Life 2: Episode One
• Prey
• Quake 4
• Serious Sam 2

Third-person 3D shooters:

• Hitman: Blood Money
• Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
• Tomb Raider: Legend

RPG

• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
• Titan Quest

Simulators:

• Pacific Fighters
• X3: Reunion

Strategies:

• Age of Empires 3
• Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends

Synthetic benchmarks:

• Futuremark 3DMark05 build 1.2.0
• Futuremark 3DMark06 build 1.0.2