ATI Radeon X1900 XTX And CrossFire: R580 Is Here

Name: ATI Radeon X1900 XTX And CrossFire: R580 Is Here - Page 13
Brand: ATI

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, January 24, 2006, 08:00 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 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, that is a Radeon 9000 or GeForce4 Ti-class or better, to adequately run the game. Using the full retail release of the game patched to v1.02, we put the graphics cards in this review through their paces to see how they fared with a popular title. Here, all graphics settings within the game were set to the 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 1280x960 and 1600x1200, with and without anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled.

We had some interesting results with the F.E.A.R. benchmark. In a single-card configuration, the new Radeon X1900 XTX was the best performer, outpacing NVIDIA's 512MB GeForce 7800 GTX in all but one test (1280x960 No AA / No Aniso). Generally speaking, without any anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering NVIDIA's performance is strong, while ATI's performance is more formidable when additional pixel processing is used. In a dual-card configuration, however, a pair of 512MB GTXs running in SLI mode offers the best performance. CrossFire doesn't scale very well in this game; as you can see, even a single X1900 is faster than a pair of 1800 XTs. We suspect things could change with a future driver optimizations, but for now NVIDIA's still got an edge here as far as multi-GPU performance goes.

Tags: ATI, Radeon, Fire, CrossFire, SSF, x1, OS, r580, ATI Radeon, 580, OSS, XT, here, R5, and

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