Sapphire Radeon X1900 GT

On budget and on fire!

Date reviewed: November 25th, 2006

Author: Christos

Now let's see how the card fares with Quake 4 based on the Doom 3 engine. The card does very well here, hitting an impressive 34 average fps on the highest resolution tested and with Ultra Quality settings turned on. Unfortunately when you turn on Ultra Quality in this game it warns you that it will create 500MB textures and basically that you should have a good card in your system in order to run the game with this feature on. And since the X1900 GT has 256MB of memory on it, it gets into trouble with Ultra Quality. You can play the game with the Ultra Quality setting on, but at certain points during play the game freezes in order to process all the textures. These freeze spells occured to often and caused me major frustration during play and it was just not fun to play the game like that. I did notice that by lowering the AA setting the freeze spells occured less often hence that may be a way around the issue. Without High Quality on, the game ran very nicely at the highest resolution and 6xAA hitting an amazing 38 average fps. This card is a little powerhouse. Note: for this game i chose the AA settings via ATI's driver.

Chaos Theory is a bit dated, but it's still a good game to test a videocard with. The Sapphire X1900 GT performs superbly in this game. At the highest resolution tested : 1920 X 1440, the card hits 30 average fps and this is with the highest quality settings enabled including: 4xAA & 16xAF. By looking at the chart you will notice that the X1900 GT is barely affected when you increase the AA setting. Hence you can set AA & AF to max and not have to worry about anything. The only setting where the X1900 GT faulters in Chaos Theory is the 1920 X 1440-6xAA & 16xAF setting. This is the only time the card dipped below 30 avg. fps.