Sapphire Radeon X1950 XTX

Name: Sapphire Radeon X1950 XTX - Page 4
Brand: Sapphire

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, January 30, 2007, 09:00 PM 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 in mid-2003, gamers the world over sat in eager anticipation. Unfortunately, thanks to a compromised internal network, the theft of a portion of the game's source code, and a tumultuous relationship with the game's distributor, Vivendi Universal, we all had to wait quite a while to get our hands on HL2. 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.

The performance trend in our custom Half Life 2: Episode 1 benchmark look similar to the 3DMark06 results on the previous page. In this test, the Sapphire Radeon X1950 XTX easily outpaces the GeForce 7900 GTX, but trails all other high-end NVIDIA offerings. The recently released GeForce 8800 GTX and GTS cards in particular outperformed the X1950 XTX by a large margin.

Tags: Radeon, Sapphire, App, x1, SAP, XT, AP

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