Scaling: GeForce 7900GS vs Radeon X1950 Pro
With a new platform, we think the time has come to establish a new base of performance. Something to compare to for future reviews. The move to the new platform brought about several changes - moving from AMD to Intel, the use of dual core processors, a new motherboard and chipset, DDR2-SDRAM and onboard sound. Though the advantages are many and significant, we're still in the process of getting used to this new system. Our last article delves on our experiences with the Core 2 Duo E6300 and the Intel P965 chipset. Now it's time to look at other components of the system.Of course, the next important component crucial to gaming performance is the graphics card. After all, what's the point of having a new fast system - processor, chipset and memory - if you do not have a powerful enough graphics card to keep up with the processor or vice versa. Now, every gamer knows that choosing a graphics card is a little harder than choosing a processor. Unlike a processor, graphics card have some 'influence' on output quality. With a processor, the main concern is usually just how fast the processor can run games or benchmarks. Output quality between one processor and the other are identical down to the last bit. With graphics cards, we have a lot more to be concerned about: raw performance, performance at higher resolutions, performance with and without anti aliasing (AA) and anisotropic filtering (AF), image quality, graphical features, shader support etc. That's outside the many hardware oriented nature like heat dissipation, temperature, noise levels and power consumption that also applies when we're choosing a processor.
The introduction of a new operating system - Windows Vista - also brought on a new graphics API - DirectX 10. At the moment, the only add-on graphics cards supporting DirectX 10 are NVIDIA's GeForce 8 series, all of which cost above USD 350, including the newly launched GeForce 8800GTS 320 MB. ATI have yet to release their DirectX 10 lineup. However, it will be a while before DirectX 10 (and Vista) games start to emerge and possibly even longer for DirectX 10 compliance hardware to become the requisite.
Vista only complicates matters further because the new operating system needs a new set of drivers and writing good, stable and high performing drivers is never an easy task. It's only just recently NVIDIA released WHQL drivers for Vista. From early previews, there are some notable features missing from these drivers - the most glaring is the lack of SLI support for all GeForce 6, 7 and 8 series of cards. In addition to that, performance with Vista can vary widely between faster, similar to lower than Windows XP. So, for the time being we've decided not to use Vista, prefering to give it and the drivers more time to mature.
Despite all of that, the arrival of a new API and products supporting it always complicates the decision of which graphics card we should buy (even if we're still using Windows XP). Do you buy the latest, greatest hardware and become an early adopter, paying a premium for that part or do you stick to the tried and true older hardware, costing less but may not be up to the task of running newer games? These are the question we have to ask ourselves when we were choosing the graphics card to use for our new platforms. More likely than not, these are also the questions facing gamers everywhere right now. NVIDIA past mistake - the GeForceFX - still haunts gamers everywhere and the manufacturer themselves to this day. This is why some gamers choose to adopt a 'wait-and-see' position on DirectX 10 and the new GeForce 8 series.
Of course, there's also those who just like to keep their options open. Rumors of ATI's first DirectX 10 line of products, from the high-end R600 to the entry level RV610 are swarming the web as we speak. The latest news as of the time of this article reveal that AMD have changed its plans and will launch their products on the second quarter rather than Q1 as originally planned. Perhaps waiting for Vista demand to pickup (contrary to what Bill Gates are saying, Vista have not prove to be a sales driver for new PCs and components).
We think that for the moment, the toughest competitors to the GeForce 8 series is not ATI's next generation of cards, but their current X1900 series. Contrary to what some people believe, most users do not buy high end graphics cards such as the GeForce 8800. Mainstream cards costing about USD 200 - 250 with just the right mix of price and performance are the mainstay of both manufacturers sales. NVIDIA still retains the GeForce 7900 / 7950 series for this market, just like ATI still has the Radeon X1950 Pro / GT. Rumors are already circulating that NVIDIA plans to release mainstream DirectX 10 parts very soon. Performance reviews of the Radeon X1950 Pro puts in par with the GeForce 7900 / 7950 series of cards, of which the GeForce 7900GS shares pretty much the same price.
So today, we will be running test on both the GeForce 7900GS and the Radeon X1950 Pro to see which card provide the more 'omph' for your hard earned, gaming dollars. However, since these cards are basically derivatives of the GeForce 7900GTX (some of us like to think 7800GTX is more appropriate) and Radeon X1900XT, we won't be doing any iamge quality tests today. Image quality output from these cards should be the same as their high end siblings. Today's article will focus on scalability or the scaling capabilities of these two cards (in addition to seeing their performance in games).
Driver Problems
Before we begin, we have several issues we have to get out of the way first. During the process of testing for this article, we've encounter several problems and annoyances with graphics card drivers from both ATI / AMD and NVIDIA. We briefly mentioned the Catalyst 7.1 bug with Homeworld 2 in our last article. This bug causes huge performance drops when we enable Shadows with Homeworld 2. NVIDIA's current drivers - Forceware 93.71 do not have this problem, but we think to make comparison possible we should be using the same settings for both cards / drivers. We also mentioned another performance limiting bug on both drivers with F1 Career Challenge that makes it impossible to use this benchmark for today's test.There are some other performance 'aspects' we're still trying to figure out. It could be the drivers or related to the new platform we're using. While running F.E.A.R's Performance Test, we notice minimum frame rates with the new platform are actually lower than waht we got with our old platform - the single core Athlon 64 3500+ at default clocks with the NForce 4 SLI chipset. Our first thought was this is a driver related matter, but this behavior is present on both cards. Our second suspect is the onboard audio drivers, which we're still looking into. However, the load should be negligible with dual core processor such as the Core 2 Duo E6300, particularly if it's running at 7 x 400 MHz. This was not the case - both cards scored lower minimum fps on F.E.A.R Performance test although we're running the E6300 at 2.8 GHz. We're pretty sure it's not due to graphical limitations of the card since the same card - GeForce 7900GS - did offer higher minimum frame rates with our old platform.
Another performance 'aspects' we saw was some very annoying stuttering in some games (F.E.A.R, Serious Sam II) with the Radeon X1950 Pro. We also saw no stuttering before when we paired this card with our old platform. With 2 GBs of RAM, there should not be any memory or storage related stuttering, so we were very puzzled by this. Thankfully, we found what was causing the stuttering, which we will elaborate further later on. Although newer drivers are already available from both manufacturers (Catalyst 7.2 and Forceware 9x.xx WHQL), the bulk of testing we're already finished by the time these drivers are out, so we will be sticking to the older drivers for this article.
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