X-bit labs

XFX GeForce 7600 GT XXX Edition Graphics Card Review (page 16)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin

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

Performance in Simulators

Pacific Fighters

Graphics cards from the Radeon X1000 family do not support vertex texturing, so they can’t use Shader Model 3.0 to render the water surface with the maximum possible quality in this game. This is only achievable on Nvidia’s GeForce 6 and 7 cards.

Like the rest of flight simulators from Maddox Games, Pacific Fighters is optimized for Nvidia’s GeForce 6 and 7 series processors. It is no wonder then that the XFX GeForce 7600 GT XXX Edition has very high results in this test and makes all the resolutions playable in the “pure speed” mode.

Notwithstanding the 128-bit memory bus, the XFX card enjoys an even bigger advantage over its opponent when we enable full-screen antialiasing, but meets competition in 1600x1200 from the Radeon X1800 XL that has 16 pixel processors, 16 TMUs and 16 ROPs. This has no practical value, though. The average performance of the cards in this resolution is too low for comfortable play.

X3: Reunion

ATI’s Radeon X1000 cards almost always have better results in the space simulator X3: Reunion than same-class solutions from Nvidia. The game engine must have been designed in such a way as to fully utilize the key features of the Radeon X1000 architecture that was originally optimized to execute shaders with complex mathematics as quickly as possible.

Despite the increased GPU and memory clock rates, it is only in 1024x768 resolution (without full-screen antialiasing, of course) that the XFX GeForce 7600 GT XXX Edition shows an acceptable average speed. It may seem that the game can be played with comfort in 1280x1024 or in 1024x768 with enabled FSAA, but irritating slowdowns are possible during an intense space fight when there are many spaceships on the screen at the same time. The game is generally rather capricious and its speed may be even lower in some cases than the numbers we’ve got in our tests.