ATI Radeon X1K Refresh: X1950 XTX, X1900 XT 256MB, X1650 Pro, and X1300 XT
X1950 / X1900 F.E.A.R. v1.07
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;) 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. |
If you look back at our F.E.A.R. performance numbers from the GeForce 7950 GX2 launch, you'll see that ATI has done an admirable job optimizing their drivers for this game. Back in June, a Radeon X1900 XTX CrossFire rig posted 66 frames per second in this test when the resolution was set to 1,600x1,200. Now, the same rig puts up 75 FPS thanks to the improvements in the Catalyst v6.8 drivers. Regardless of ATI's progress, the GeForce 7950 GX2 is clearly superior to the Radeon X1950 in the single-card tests. And in the multi-card tests, Quad-SLI scaled fairly well which resulted in a one-two finish for NVIDIA here.
The 256MB Radeon X1900 XT continued to outpace the GeForce 7900 GT, and the Radeon X1950 XTX was able to overtake the GeForce 7900 GTX were the Radeon X1900 XTX could not, but the GeForce 7950 GX2 - whether using one or two cards - was clearly the dominant performer with F.E.A.R..
