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No doubt about it, the Radeon X1900 XTX is faster. Splinter Cell Chaos Theory's heavy shader use is also helping a lot here. Even at 1600 x 1200, we still have high enough frame rates, with minimum frame rates of around 35 fps. On the other hand, only the higher clocked GeForce 7800GTX can muster the same level of performance, but at lower resolutions.

Quite odd though, turning off tone mapping actually caused a decrease in performance on the GeForce 7800GTX. With comparable image quality from both cards, it's definitely a no brainer here. The Radeon X1900 XTX wins, hands down.

Conclusion:

ATI's latest offering, the Radeon X1900 XTX is strong, but it does have its weak points. We already covered the lack of performance with texture dependent games in our last article, and now we discovered that ATI's adaptive antialiasing is not as effective as NVIDIA's transparency anti aliasing. You don't really gain that much image quality improvement, even with Quality setting.

However, we also saw that ATI is putting the Radeon X1900 XTX as a forward looking part. HDR performance is way stronger than the GeForce 7800GTX, even in texture dependent games like Serious Sam II. In shader heavy games like Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, the Radeon X1900 XTX is simply on a higher level than the GeForce 7800GTX. Of course, the icing on the cake is the ability to use AA with HDR, something the GeForce 7800GTX lacks.

Overall, while the Radeon X1900 is not always the fastest card around in all games, it is faster with AA and AF and it is faster in new, shader heavy games. Even with texture dependent games, the Radeon X1900 is still able to supply gamers with more than enough frame rates and in most cases still retain the lead with AA and AF enabled. Not only that, it also bring to the table higher quality visuals (HQ AF) with virtually no performance loss.

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