ATI Radeon X1950 Pro with Native CrossFire

Name: ATI Radeon X1950 Pro with Native CrossFire - Page 4
Brand: ATI

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, October 17, 2006, 05:00 AM EDT

Performance Comparisons with Half-Life 2: Episode 1

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

Half Life 2: Episode 1

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, gamers the world over sat in eager anticipation. Upon its release, HL2 was universally lauded, and the sequel won an array of "Game of the Year" awards. Armed with the latest episodic update to HL2, Episode 1, we benchmarked the game with a long, custom-recorded timedemo that takes us through both outdoor and indoor environments. These tests were run at resolutions of 1,280 x 1,024 and 1,600 x 1,200 with 4X anti-aliasing and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently, and with color correction and HDR rendering enabled in the game engine as well.

Once again, the new Radeon X1950 Pro's performance in a single card configuration falls somewhere in between the GeForce 7900 GS and 7950 GT, and right about on-par with the GeForce 7900 GT. The 256MB Radeon X1900 XT was significantly faster at both resolutions, however.

In a dual card CrossFire configuration, the X1950 Pros performed very well at the lower resolution, actually besting the 7900 GTX and 7950 GT SLI configurations, but once the resolution was jacked up to 1600x1200, the NVIDIA powered offerings came charging back and outperformed the X1950 Pros by about 15% to 22%.

Tags: ATI, Radeon, Fire, CrossFire, SSF, x1, OS, ATI Radeon, OSS, NAT, Ive, pro, 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