Sapphire Toxic Radeon X1900 XTX

Name: Sapphire Toxic Radeon X1900 XTX - Page 4
Brand: Sapphire

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, April 10, 2006, 08:00 AM EDT

Performance Comparisons with Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.05

Details: http://www.splintercell3.com/us/

SC: Chaos Theory

Based on a heavily modified version of the Unreal Engine, enhanced with a slew of DX9 shaders, lighting and mapping effects, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory is gorgeous with its very immersive, albeit dark, environment. The game engine has a shader model 3.0 code path that allows the GeForce 6 & 7 Series of cards and the X1000 family of cards to really shine, and a recent patch has implemented a shader model 2.0 path for ATI's X8x0 generation of graphics hardware. For these tests we enabled the SM 3.0 path on all of the cards we tested. However, High Dynamic Range rendering was disabled so that we could test the game with anti-aliasing enabled (a future patch should enable AA with HDR on the X1K family). We benchmarked the game at resolutions of 1,280 x 1024 and 1,600 x 1,200, both with and without anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering.

Without any additional pixel processing used, the GeForce 7900 GTX held onto small leads at both resolutions, but the scales tip in favor of the Radeon X1900 XTXs, or more specifically the Toxic Radeon X1900 XTX, when AA and Anisotropic filtering are enabled. Once again, the Toxic's increased clock speeds give it enough of an edge to outpace the 7900 GTX at 1280x1024 4X/16X, where the reference X1900 XTX could not.

Tags: Radeon, Sapphire, App, x1, SAP, Toxic, 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