Tech-Hounds.com

Performance

We didn't change our test setup from the last article, it's pretty much the same. We've included results from both a standard clocked and a higher clocked GeForce 7800GTX (the ASUS EN7800GTX TOP) with comparable settings (standard 4x AA 16x AF and with transparency antialiasing enabled). Of course, we chose supersampling for best quality The X1900 XTX is still our choice for this article to represent the X1900 series. The X1900 XTX was tested in standard 4x AA 16xAF and with adaptive antialiasing enabled (under both Performance and Quality settings).

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 4xAA and 16x AF and the second represent results with 4xAA and 16xAF with adaptive or transparency antialiasing enabled and set to supersampling mode (or Quality on the Radeon X1900 XTX). For the X1900XTX, the third group represent results with 4xAA and 16x AF with adaptive antialiasing enabled and set to multisampling mode (or Performance). These results are in frame rate per second.

The results:

Unsurprisingly, the Radeon X1900 XTX is faster than the GeForce 7800GTX and quite by a significant margin under the same settings. After all, its not really achieving much, so it's probably doing less work. While minimum frame rates is pretty similar on both the higher clocked GeForce 7800GTX and the Radeon X1900 XTX, the Radeon offer a slightly higher average frame rate, even at 1600 x 1200. It's a hollow victory, really because we know the quality is better on both GeForce 7800GTX.

	GeForce 7800GTX TOP		GeForce 7800GTX		Radeon X1900 XTX
	4x AA 16x AF	4x SSAA 16x AF	4x AA 16x AF	4x SSAA 16x AF	4x AA 16x AF	4x SSAA 16x AF
<30 fps	0	0	0	5	0	0
30-45 fps	0	78	0	114	0	0
45-60 fps	0	142	0	124	0	0
60-90 fps	38	40	141	18	1	43
90-120 fps	213	1	117	0	120	120
>120 fps	10	0	3	0	140	98
Total	261	261	261	261	261	261

results are in seconds

This table and graph again show just how heavy transparency antialiasing is on the GeForce 7800GTX. The frame rate dropped from around 60 - 120 fps to 30 - 90 fps with supersampling transparency antialiasing. Mind you, this is at 1024 x 768 and judging by the numbers, you really don't want to use a higher resolution. Even the Radeon X1900 XTX is feeling the pinch, spending more time below 90 fps with adaptive antialiasing (43 seconds as opposed to 1 second).

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