Tech-Hounds.com

Performance

We put off examinations of transparency anti aliasing and HDR performance for the time being - hopefully we can examine them more closely next week. For now, we'll be focusing on performance under default, 4x AA and 16x AF, and also 6x AA and HQ AF settings. To put these scores into perspective, we've included results from both a standard clocked and a higher clocked GeForce 7800GTX (the ASUS EN7800GTX TOP) with comparable settings (default and 4x AA 16x AF). Out of the many cards in the X1900 series, we chose the X1900 XTX for this article, which is the current high end model of the X1900 series. Performance with X1900 XT should be slightly slower, though not by much.

We'd like to thank both Tagan and Kingston for supplying the additional power supply and 1 GB memory modules for this article. We'd also like to thank Gigabyte for providing the Radeon X1900 XTX sample card.

Our test setup
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ socket 939
2 x 1024 MB Kingston KVR 3-3-3 PC3200 DDR-SDRAM
MSI K8N NForce 4 SLI motherboard
Maxtor DiamondMaxPlus9 80 GBs Serial ATA 8 MB buffer
ASUS E-616 DVD-ROM
Tagan TG530-U15 530 watts ATX/BTX power supply

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed
ATI Catalyst 6.2 reference driver
NVIDIA Forceware 81.98 reference driver
NVIDIA NForce 4 6.66 reference driver
Creative SoundBlaster Live! 24 bit 5.12.1.512 driver.
DirectX 9.0c

The graphs are pretty self explanatory, but in case you can't see the text, they're arranged in groups of three colors: green for minimum fps, blue for average fps and red for maximum fps. The first group represent test results under default settings, and the second represent results with 4xAA and 16xAF enabled. For the X1900XTX, the third group represent results with 4xAA and 16x HQ AF, while the fourth represent 6xAA and 16x HQ AF. These results are in frame rate per second.

The results:

Obviously we're system limited at 1024 x 768, even with AA and AF. Only at 1280 x 1024 and higher do we see the three cards behave differently. The difference becomes more apparent at 1600 x 1200. It's clear that the GeForce 7800GTX is faster under default settings, but with AA and AF, the Radeon X1900 XTX reigns supreme. We're still seeing very high frame rates with 6xAA and 16x HQ AF in 1600 x 1200 with the Radeon X1900 XTX, much more than we're getting with the GeForce 7800GTX.

Call of Duty is quite old, so we doubt the 512 MB RAM on the Radeon X1900 XTX is making that much of a difference here. ATI retains the lead even when we enabled 6xAA with 16x HQ AF. It looks like ATI's claims has some truth - both HQ and 6x is relatively free. However, we'd have to see if that's true just for old games or all games in general.

	GeForce 7800GTX TOP		GeForce 7800GTX		Radeon X1900 XTX
	Default	4x AA 16x AF	Default	4x AA 16x AF	Default	4x AA 16x AF
<30 fps	0	0	0	0	0	0
30-45 fps	0	0	0	0	0	0
45-60 fps	0	0	0	0	0	0
60-90 fps	3	8	4	32	8	9
90-120 fps	6	58	5	42	9	12
>120 fps	67	10	67	2	59	55
Total	76	76	76	76	76	76

results are in seconds

In case you're wondering, the table above is actually a brokedown of the benchmark results, displaying the time spent throughout the replay organized into several different frame rate ranges. Because this is a replay and not a timedemo, the replay runtime is the same between all cards. Now look at the 60 - 90 fps range, where the minimum fps shown by the earlier graphs are. You'll see both the Radeon X1900 XTX and the higher clocked GeForce 7800GTX spending less than 10 seconds here. We can also see the Radeon X1900 XTX is pretty much system limited, with virtually no difference across the entire fps range with and without AA and AF. In comparison, both the GeForce drop from above 120 fps to the 90 - 120 fps range when AA and AF is enabled.

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