X-bit labs

XFX GeForce 7600 GT XXX Edition Graphics Card Review (page 12)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin

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

Half-Life 2

The engine of the original Half-Life 2 has a curious feature: the speed ceiling goes higher for graphics cards on ATI Technologies’ than on Nvidia’s graphics processors as is perfectly visible in low resolutions.

High-quality and high-resolution textures are used in Half-Life 2 to a great extent. That’s why even the pre-overclocked XFX GeForce 7600 XXX Edition is lagging behind the Radeon X1800 GTO at the “eye candy” settings, but the gap is small. Although this game isn’t very demanding by today’s standards, the speed of the GeForce 7600 GT is less than 50fps in 1600x1200 with enabled 4x FSAA and even the pre-overclocked version of this card made by XFX barely reaches this point. You can play normally at this speed, but may want to limit yourself to 1280x1024 to safeguard you against slowdowns in complex scenes with many opponents.

Half-Life 2: Episode One

The XFX GeForce 7600 GT XXX Edition is confidently ahead of the Radeon X1800 GTO in both test modes and in any of the standard resolutions. It also has almost the same results as the Radeon X1800 XL in the “eye candy” mode. The XFX card is strong enough to permit to play comfortably in 1280x1024 with enabled 4x full-screen antialiasing. We do recommend you to use this resolution at the “pure speed” settings, too, because the average frame rate bottoms out to below 55fps on the XFX GeForce 7600 GT XXX Edition.

We want to remind you that a frame rate of 55-60fps is the limit of comfort for first-person 3D shooters and it is also desired that the minimum speed be not lower than 30-35fps in the hardest-to-render scenes. If these conditions are complied with, the gamer has the necessary smoothness of movement and accuracy of shooting. Without this, the game character’s life may prove to be just too short.