ATI Radeon X1650 XT with Native CrossFire

Name: ATI Radeon X1650 XT with Native CrossFire - Page 6
Brand: ATI

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, October 30, 2006, 05:00 AM EDT

Performance Comparisons with F.E.A.R

More Info: http://www.whatisfear.com/us/

F.E.A.R

One of the most highly anticipated titles of 2005 was Monolith's paranormal thriller F.E.A.R. Taking a look at the game's minimum system requirements, we see that you will need at least a 1.7GHz Pentium 4 with 512MB of system memory and a 64MB graphics card in the Radeon 9000 or GeForce4 Ti-classes or better, to adequately run the game. Using the full retail release of the game patched to v1.07, we put the graphics cards in this article through their paces to see how they fared with a popular title. Here, all graphics settings within the game were set to their maximum values, but with soft shadows disabled (Soft shadows and anti-aliasing do not work together currently). Benchmark runs were then completed at resolutions of 1,280x960 and 1,600x1,200, with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled.

In single-card mode, the Radeon X1650 XT pulled off another slight victory over the GeForce 7600 GT, besting NVIDIA's current mid-range offering by a couple of frames per second at both resolution. F.E.A.R. just doesn't want to cooperate with CrossFire though. At both resolutions, the GeForce 7600 GT cards' performance running in SLI mode scales by over 90%. Conversely, the Radeon X1650 XT's performance scales by only 10% to 50% in CrossFire mode, so they trail the GeForce cards by a significant margin here.

Tags: ATI, Radeon, Fire, CrossFire, SSF, x1, OS, ATI Radeon, x16, OSS, NAT, XT, Ive, ativ

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com