ATI Radeon X1950 XTX 512MB DDR4

Test Setup

Test Setup

We brought out our usual graphics rig for the all-important benchmark testing. This consisted of an AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 (2.6GHz) processor on a MSI K8N Diamond Plus motherboard. We added 1GB of low latency DDR400 RAM from Kingston, running in dual channel mode while the storage department was taken care by a 80GB Seagate 7200.7 SATA hard drive. Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 was installed along with the newest version of DirectX 9.0c.

The new Radeon X1950 XTX came with its specific set of beta drivers, which looked to be based on Catalyst 6.7. Since we didn't have the time to rerun all our older ATI cards with these new drivers, we recycled our Catalyst 6.5 results. These scores should be a reasonably close approximation of what these cards are capable of, especially since there hasn't been much performance tweaks from ATI recently; the changes seem to be mostly bug fixes. Besides the reference cards from ATI, we also threw in probably the fastest Radeon X1900 XTX in retail now, the HIS Radeon X1900 XTX 512MB IceQ3 to see if the new challenger is up to it. We've also tried out a new modified Catalyst 6.8 driver set to support the Radeon X1950 XTX just before publishing this article, but unfortunately, there were no gains to be seen (and no losses thankfully).

For the NVIDIA cards, we had the champion albeit tag team combo of the GeForce 7950 GX2 running on ForceWare 91.29 drivers. Again, these are not the newest available but should be close enough to suit our purposes. We have added a GeForce 7900 GTX as a reference but it was on 84.21 drivers. The following benchmarks were tested:

• Futuremark 3DMark05 Pro (version 120)
• Futuremark 3DMark06 Pro (version 102)
• F.E.A.R
• Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell 3: Chaos Theory (version 1.3)
• Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (version 1.1)
• Quake 4