ATI All-In-Wonder HD, A Legend Returns
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Thanks to the dedication of hardcore PC gamers and a huge mod-community, the original Half-Life became one of the most successful first person shooters of all time. And thanks to an updated game engine, gorgeous visual, and intelligent weapon and level design, Half Life 2 became just as popular. Episode 2 offers a number of visual enhancements including better looking transparent texture anti-aliasing. These tests were run at resolutions of 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 with 4X anti-aliasing and 8X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently. Color correction and HDR rendering were enabled in the game engine as well. We used a custom recorded timedemo file to benchmark all cards in this test. |
The beauty of the Half-Life series is that it both looks and runs good, even on entry level hardware. While the frame rates were low and certainly the lowest of the three cards tested, the game appeared smooth and quite playable on the All-In-Wonder HD, with excellent imagery.
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If you're a long-time PC gamer, the Unreal Tournament franchise should need no introduction. UT's fast paced action and over the top weapons have been popular for as long as Epic has been making the games. For these tests, we used the latest addition to the franchise, Unreal Tournament 3. The game doesn't have a built-in benchmarking tool, however, so we enlisted the help of FRAPS here. These tests were run at resolutions of 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 with no anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering enabled, but with the UT3's in game graphical options set to their medium values, with color correction enabled. |
Once again the All-In-Wonder HD trailed the Sapphire HD 3650 and GeForce 8600 GTS, with the Sapphire model taking the top position. When factoring in the clock differences, the All-In-Wonder HD actually competed well and at a respectable level.
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If you're at all into enthusiast computing, the highly anticipated single player, FPS smash-hit Crysis, should require no introduction. Crytek's game engine visuals are easily the most impressive real-time 3D renderings we've seen on the computer screen to date. The engine employs some of the latest techniques in 3D rendering like Parallax Occlusion Mapping, Subsurface Scattering, Motion Blur and Depth-of-Field effects, as well as some of the most impressive use of Shader technology we've seen yet. In short, for those of you that want to skip the technical jib-jab, Crysis is HOT. We ran the SP demo with all of the game's visual options set to 'Medium' to put a balanced load on the graphics cards being tested. |
With all settings on medium quality, Crysis looked a bit more like the original Far Cry, lacking the realism the updated gaming engine has proven that it can deliver. Nonetheless, for cards of this class to run such a taxing test, image quality had to be reduced. In the end, the All-In-Wonder HD fell just short of the GeForce 8600 GTS, trailing roughly 3FPS at both resolutions. Those margins jumped to an average of 5FPS when compared to the Sapphire HD 3650 with its overclocked GPU and memory.
