ATI Radeon X1950 Pro: CrossFire Done Right
by Derek Wilson on October 17, 2006 6:22 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
F.E.A.R. Performance
F.E.A.R. has a built in test that we make use of in this performance analysis.
This test flies through some action as people shoot each other and things blow
up. F.E.A.R. is very heavy on the graphics, and we enable most of the high end
settings for our test.
During our testing of F.E.A.R., we noted that the "soft shadows" don't really
look soft. They jumped out at us as multiple transparent shadows layered on
top of each other and jittered to appear soft. Unfortunately, this costs a lot
in performance and not nearly enough shadows are used to make this look
realistic. Thus, we disable soft shadows in our test even though it's one of
the large performance drains on the system.
Again we tested with anisotropic filtering at 8x, and all options were on
their highest quality (with the exception of soft shadows which was disabled).
Frame rates for F.E.A.R. can get pretty low for a first person shooter, but
the game does a good job of staying playable down to about 25 fps.
The $400 SLI/CrossFire solutions from NVIDIA and ATI essentially tie each other under F.E.A.R. This does mean that SLI once again scales better than CrossFire, but the X1950 Pro maintains its performance advantage.
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Spoelie - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
Bit disappointed, was hoping for 600/700 clocks. I'm curious about the temperatures under load and if it would easily overclock to at least those speeds. And what about HDCP? But I guess we'll have to wait for retail cards.If the price is €200 or less I just might be getting one to replace my x800xt :)
Spoelie - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
Apparantly, powercolor clocks all its x1950pro cards up to 600/700 and have a 512mb sku. Plus silent cooling :)http://www.powercolor.com/global/main_product_seri...">http://www.powercolor.com/global/main_product_seri...
No word on hdcp and price tho :/
DerekWilson - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
HDCP support is optional for vendors, but it seems like ATI is heavily encouraging them to include HDCP on all 1950 PRO cards. Since it's not guaranteed, be sure to check the specifications before you purchase.The power color 1950 PRO is not passively cooled but it includes a low dB fan. It does look like an interesting product, and we intend to acquire one for further investigation.
Goty - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
Go read the review over at bit-tech. They've got prices up and the Saphire card they reviewed has HDCP.MadBadger - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
Thanks for the review :beer;An observation:
-the pricefinder at the top of the article seems a bit out of whack. It shows as x1950 512 mb (PCI), but it links to the 1950 pro 256 mb for amazon and to the x1950 xt for the others.