X-bit labs

XFX GeForce 7600 GT XXX Edition Graphics Card Review (page 11)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin

[ 07/27/2006 | 11:49 AM ]

F.E.A.R.

Having fewer pixel processors, the XFX GeForce 7600 GT XXX Edition makes up for it with its high graphics core frequency. As a result, it looks competitive against the Radeon X1800 XL in the “pure speed” mode and provides a comfortable speed in resolutions up to 1280x1024.

The XFX card is not that impressive in the FSAA mode, but it is still no worse than the Radeon X1800 GTO and even provides a slightly higher speed reserve in 1024x768: 29fps against the opponent’s 25fps. The higher resolutions aren’t interesting for a gamer because the GeForce 7900 GT with its 24 TMUs is the only graphics card here that is capable of yielding an average frame rate of about 50fps in 1280x1024.

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter

Because of the use of the so-called deferred rendering it is technically impossible to turn on full-screen antialiasing in this game. That’s why we publish only the “pure speed” mode results here. Moreover, the game automatically limits the range of available display resolutions and graphics quality settings for graphics cards with less than 512MB of graphics memory on board. All the cards participating in this review are equipped with 256 megabytes of memory, which made it impossible to use the resolution of 1600x1200.

The GeForce 7600 GT has a higher core frequency in comparison with the Radeon X1800 GTO and is therefore as fast as the Radeon X1800 XL, even with fewer pixel processors. The XFX card turns in even better results, but cannot catch up with the Radeon X1900 GT which has a little lower core clock rate but three times the number of pixel processors.

You may note that none of the mainstream cards can give you 50fps in this game, although full-screen antialiasing is not used. You can only have this speed on a GeForce 7900 GT or a Radeon X1900 GT which belong to a higher product category. Anyway, the GeForce 7600 GT and Radeon X1800 GTO/XL never slow down to below 30fps, at least in 1024x768. This means that you can play Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter on these cards, too, but under not very comfortable conditions.