ATI's New Leader in Graphics Performance: The Radeon X1900 Series

Hardware Features and Test Setup

We're talking about features and tests today because we are going to be trying something a bit different this time around. In addition to our standard noAA/4xAA tests (both of which always have 8xAF enabled), we are including a performance test at maximal image quality on each architecture. This won't give us directly comparable numbers in terms of performance, but it will give us an idea of playability at maximum quality.

These days, we are running out of ways to push our performance tests. Plenty of games out there are CPU limited, and for what purpose is a card as powerful as an X1900XTX or 7800 GTX 512 purchased except to be pushed to its limit and beyond? Certainly, a very interesting route to go would be for us to purchase a few apple cinema displays and possibly an old IBM T221 and go insane with resolution. And maybe we will at some point. But for now, most people don't have 30" displays (though the increasing power of today's graphics cards is certainly a compelling argument for such an investment). For now, people can push their high end cards by enabling insane features and getting the absolute maximum eye candy possible out of all their games. Flight and space sim nuts now have angle independent anisotropic filtering on ATI hardware, adaptive antialiasing for textured surfaces helps in games with lots of fences and wires and tiny detail work, and 6xAA combined with 16xAF means you'll almost never have to look at a blurry texture with jagged edges again. It all comes at a price, or course, but is it worth it?

In our max quality tests, we will compare ATI parts with 16xAF, 6xAA, adaptive AA, high quality AF and as little catalyst AI as possible enabled to NVIDIA parts with 16xAF, 4x or 8xS AA (depending on reasonable support in the application), transparency AA, and no optimizations (high quality) enabled. In all cases, ATI will have the image quality advantage with angle independent AF and 6x MSAA. Some games with in game AA settings didn't have an option for 8xAA and didn't play well when we forced it in the driver, so we opted to go with the highest in game AA setting most of the time (which is reflected by the highest MSAA level supported in hardware - again most of the time). We tend to like NVIDIA's transparency SSAA a little better than ATI's adaptive AA, but that may just come down to opinion and it still doesn't make up for the quality advantages the X1900 holds over the 7800 GTX lineup.

Our standard tests should look pretty familiar, and here is all the test hardware we used. Multiple systems were required in order to test both CrossFire and SLI, but all single card tests were performed in the ATI reference RD480 board.

ATI Radeon Express 200 based system
NVIDIA nForce 4 based system
AMD Athlon 64 FX-57
2x 1GB DDR400 2:3:2:8
120 GB Seagate 7200.7 HD
600 W OCZ PowerStream PSU

First up is our apples to apples testing with NVIDIA and ATI setup to produce comparable image quality with 8xAF and either no AA or 4xAA. The resolutions we will look at are 1280x960 (or 1024) through 2048x1536.