Sapphire Radeon X1900 GT
On budget and on fire!
Date reviewed: November 25th, 2006
Author: Christos
I used the following setup to run the benchmarks. The benchmarks were run 2 times each and the average was used. When you see High Qual. listed in the benchmark charts, it means that all the in-game graphical settings were set to their highest possible setting. Exceptions will be displayed in the charts. For example antialising will change hence it will be displayed in the graph.
| System Specifications |
| Processor: |
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Processor S939 Venice 2.0GHZ 512K L2 Cache, overclocked to 2750Ghz, with Thermaltake Sonic Tower (CL-P0071) with fan. |
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| Motherboard: | ASRock 939Dual-SATA2, Bios version = 2.20 | |
| RAM: |
Kingston ValueRAM 2x512MB-DDR400, since cpu is overclocked, I used a 3:2 memory divider producing a memory speed of 183Mhz or 366Mhz DDR. |
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| Hard drive: | Western Digital 160GB IDE-100MB/s. Model#: WD1600JB | |
| PSU: | Antec Phantom 500 Watt ATX12V 2.0 Silent Power supply. | |
| Case: | Antec P-180. | |
| GPU: | Sapphire X1900 GT. | |
| OS: | Windows XP with Service pack #2. | |
| Graphics Driver: | ATI Catalyst 6.9. |
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HL2: Episode One is probably the most beautiful first person shooter out there, and the X1900 GT does very well here. I've included the min. fps because this needs to be at least 20-25 fps in order to not notice any lags during gameplay. But if you don't mind the occasional hiccup, as long as the average FPS is above 30fps you will be able to enjoy the game. This game is playable comfortably with the X1900 GT at up to 1600 X 1200 with 6xAA & 16xAF hitting an impressive 43 fps on average. There was a discrepancy with the min. fps at the 1600 X 1200 resolution, I'm not sure why this occured. It's most pronounced on the : 1600 X 1200-6xAA & 16xAF setting, where the min. fps at 19 is higher than on the 1280 X 1024-6xAA & 16xAF setting. The card only chokes at the highest setting tested here : 1920 x 1440 with 6xAA & 16xAF. At this setting the card loses 36 average fps which is a huge drop in performance. The textures are so large at this setting that the 256MB of memory on the card isn't enough to provide smooth gameplay. This is why I believe you require 512MB of memory on a graphics card today to play at the highest settings.
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F.E.A.R. is a game that will unleash a beating on your graphics card and here there is no exception. As you can tell from the numbers above you will not be able to play F.E.A.R. on the X1900 GT with all the eye candy turned on at the highest resolution. Without "soft shadows" turned on, the X1900 GT almost gets 30 fps on the 1920 X 1200-4xAA & 16xAF setting, and an amazing 34 fps on the 1600 X 1200-4xAA & 16xAF setting. You will be able to enjoy the game at this setting (1600 X 1200-4xAA & 16xAF) and it's probably the best setting to play the game with this card. Turning on 6xAA will greatly reduce performance, and you will have to settle for a much lower resolution. Not a good choice just to gain that little extra AA. By turning on "soft shadows" with no AA, the card gets a commendable 27 fps at 1600 x 1200, but the card can't keep up at higher resolutions. The only way you can play with "soft shadows" and AA turned "on" is to lower the resolution to : 1280 x 960, which would take away from the game. It looks much better at the higher resolution : 1600 X 1200. Turning on "soft shadows" is not worth the performance hit in my opinion. Now F.E.A.R is a demanding game but the X1900 GT is no slouch, it has put up some great numbers here for a midrange card still managing to churn out 30 average fps on the 1280 x 960-4xAA & 16xAF setting with "Soft Shadows" turned on!