ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 Preview

Name: ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 Preview - Page 4
Brand: ATI

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, December 05, 2005, 08:00 PM EDT

FarCry & Half Life 2

Page 4: FarCry & Half Life 2

Performance Comparisons with FarCry v1.33

Details: http://www.farcry.ubi.com/

FarCry

If you've been on top of the gaming scene for some time, you probably know that FarCry is one of the more visually impressive games to be released for the PC. Courtesy of its proprietary engine, dubbed "CryEngine" by its developers, FarCry's game-play is enhanced by Polybump mapping, advanced environment physics, destructible terrain, dynamic lighting, motion-captured animation, and surround sound. Before titles such as F.E.A.R. and Quake 4 hit the scene, FarCry gave us a taste of what was to come in next-generation 3D Gaming on the PC. We benchmarked the Mobility Radeon X1600 with a custom-recorded demo run taken in the "Catacombs" area checkpoint, at various resolutions without anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering enabled, and then with 4X AA and 8X aniso enabled concurrently.

The Mobility Radeon X1600 didn't have any trouble with FarCry until we enabled anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. Without any additional pixel processing, the Mobility Radeon X1600 posted very playable framerates at both resolutions. With anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled though, we had to run FarCry at 800x600 to maintain a decent framerate, in this case 51.74 FPS. With the resolution turned up to 1024x768, enabling AA and aniso resulted in a framerate of 38.1 FPS, a drop-off of almost 30 FPS from the default test at this resolution.

Performance Comparisons with Half-Life 2

Details: http://www.half-life2.com/

Half Life 2

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. So, when Valve announced Half-Life 2 was close to completion in mid-2003, gamers the world over sat in eager anticipation. Unfortunately, thanks to a compromised internal network, the theft of a portion of the game's source code, and a tumultuous relationship with the game's distributor, Vivendi Universal, we all had to wait until November 2004 to get our hands on this classic. We benchmarked Half-Life 2 with a long, custom-recorded timedemo in the "Canals" map, that takes us through both outdoor and indoor environments. These tests were run at resolutions of 1024x768 and 1152x864 without any anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering and with 4X anti-aliasing and 8X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently.

Half Life 2 didn't pose much of a challenge for the Mobility Radeon X1600. Regardless of resolution, or whether or not we enabled anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, the Mobility Radeon X1600 posted playable framerates in this game. Although the graphics in Half Life 2 are still considered very good, this games simply doesn't tax this generation's graphics hardware until high-resolutions are used in conjunction with high levels of anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering.