ATI Radeon X1K Refresh: X1950 XTX, X1900 XT 256MB, X1650 Pro, and X1300 XT

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, August 23, 2006, 12:00 AM EDT

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X1950 / X1900 FarCry v1.33

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 was one of the most visually impressive games to be released on the PC in the last few years. 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 Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 hit the scene, FarCry gave us a taste of what was to come in next-generation 3D gaming on the PC. We benchmarked the graphics cards in this article with a fully patched version of FarCry using a custom-recorded demo run taken in the "Catacombs" area checkpoint. The tests were run at various resolutions with 4X AA and 16X aniso enabled concurrently.

Our custom FarCry benchmark had the GeForce 7950 GX2 finishing well ahead of any other single card we tested. The Radeon X1950 XTX finished closed behind, but the GX2 was clearly faster at both resolutions. The 256Mb Radeon X1900 XT fared better versus its main competition, the GeForce 7900 GT, besting the GT by double-digit framerates in both tests.

The multi-card tests continued to follow the same trend. Somewhat surprisingly, the Quad-SLI rig did not scale as one would expect it to and the GeForce 7900 GTX SLI rig was faster. Please keep in mind that this is due to the DirectX limitation we mentioned earlier. Had we used SLIAA for this test, as opposed to the in-game anti-aliasing option, Quad-SLI would have outpaced the GTX SLI rig. The Radeon X1950 and X1900 CrossFire configuration once again ruled the roost finishing in first and second, but with all of the multi-GPU configuration posting triple-digit, or near triple-digit framerates, the performance deltas here aren't earth shattering.