Diamond Viper Radeon HD 2900 XT 1GB

Name: Diamond Viper Radeon HD 2900 XT 1GB - Page 7
Brand: Diamond

by Marco Chiappetta — Friday, September 28, 2007, 04:00 PM EDT

Performance Comparisons with S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

Details: www.stalker-game.com

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

The highly anticipated game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. makes use of a proprietary DX9 game engine, dubbed "X-Ray" by its developers. It features an advanced DX9 renderer with Defferred Shading capabilities, which allows the engine to draw a vast amount of dynamic light sources with correct materials and light ‘feedback’. Becuase S.T.A.L.K.E.R. does not have a built-in benchmarking tool, we tested the game using FRAPS at resolutions of 1,280x1,024 through 2,560 x 1,600 with the in-game anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering options set to their maximum values, and with full dynamic lighting enabled. We should also note that 'grass shadows' were disabled due to the dramatic slowdowns this feature causes during gameplay.

The Viper Radeon HD 2900 XT 1GB card's larger and faster frame buffer gave it a marked advantage over the 512MB Radeon HD 2900 XT in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and gave it the ability to hang just behind the reference GeForce 8800 GTS. However, the factory overclocked EVGA GeForece 8800 GTS and GeForce 8800 GTX were measurably faster at all resolutions.

Tags: Radeon, HD, diamond, Radeon HD, GB, Viper, XT, IP, 290, AM

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