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Performance

Since we only have one sample for each card, we didn't do any Crossfire testing. Well, actually we did, but that's another article. Right now we will only be looking at these cards as single card solutions. Testing was done with our new test setup, with our usual settings. We also limit testing to fewer games, ditching old games like Call of Duty, Homeworld 2, SW: KOTOR and Richard Burns Rally. For an idea on how a Radeon X1950 Pro perform with these games, read our article comparing the GeForce 7900GS and Radeon X1950 Pro here. Since all three cards relatively have the same core and memory clock, we don't expect much difference separating them from each other. If there are any differences, its very likely the benchmark is more sensitive to GPU memory bandwidth since the Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro has a slight memory clock advantage.

We'd like to thank Tagan for supplying the additional power supply and Gigabyte for supplying both the Gigabyte P965-DS3P for this article.

Our test setup
Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 socket LGA-775 (running at 7 x 400 MHz)
4 x 512 MB A-DATA 5-5-5-18 PC6400 DDR2-SDRAM
Gigabyte P965-DS3P Intel P965 motherboard
Maxtor DiamondMaxPlus9 80 GBs Serial ATA 8 MB buffer
LiteOn 1673S DVD-RW
Tagan TG530-U15 530 watts ATX/BTX power supply

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed
ATI Catalyst 7.2 reference driver
Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility 8.1.0.1006
DirectX 9.0c
all respected games used for benchmarks have been updated to their latest, final builds.

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 of graphs are results taken with default settings - AA and AF is not enabled. The second group of results are results with 4x AA and 16x AF.

The results:

AMD still have a lot of work to do to iron out problems with F.E.A.R. Hopefully, things will be much better with the March release of Catalyst drivers. Generally we want to see minimum frame rates near or above 40 fps in FEAR Performance Test to enjoy the whole game without any stutter or lag. At this time, all three Radeon X1950 Pro can only offer that kind of experience without AA and AF. We don't see any noticeable frame rate differences between the three cards - differences range between 1 to 2 frames and that's more likely caused by normal variations between runs than the slight clock advantage the Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro have.

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