Sapphire Radeon X1900 GT
On budget and on fire!
Date reviewed: November 25th, 2006
Author: Christos
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Next up is the fairly new release "Company of Heroes". I used Fraps to record the FPS in this games, because the built in benchmark produced odd numbers. Now I used Ultra & High settings in this game but the "Physics" option was turned OFF. COH is really tough on this card. With the Ultra settings the card can only get 30 average fps with AA turned OFF and at the 1600 X 1200 resolution, which is pretty good cause this game is brutal on GPU's. COH is best played on this card with the "High" settings using 2xAA and at the 1600 X 1200 resolution, which produced an average of 30 FPS.
Finally we look at Oblivion performance. Below is the list of video settings I used to run the benchmarks. For example an entry marked at 50%, equals to midway of the slider bar in the actual game settings.
| Oblivion Video Settings |
| Texture Size: | Large.................................. | Shadows on Grass: | Off | |||
| Tree Fade: | 90% | Tree Canopy Shadows: | On | |||
| Actor Fade: | 35% | Shadow Filtering: | High | |||
| Item Fade: | 10% | Specular Distance: | 100% | |||
| Object Fade: | 50% | HDR Lighting: | On | |||
| Grass Distance: | 50% | Bloom Lighting: | Off | |||
| View Distance: | 100% | Water Detail: | High | |||
| Distant Land: | On | Water Reflections: | On | |||
| Distant Buildings: | On | Water Ripples: | On | |||
| Distant Trees: | On | Window Reflections: | On | |||
| Int. Shadows: | 50% | Blood Decals: | High | |||
| Ext. Shadows: | 30% | Anti-Aliasing: | See chart. | |||
| Self Shadows: | Off |
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Oblivion just crushes the X1900 GT. The card cannot get an average 30 fps in any of the resolutions. But this game does favor ATI cards, and I was able to play the game at the 1600 x 1200 resolution, with NO AA. According to the numbers above that gives 17 average fps. Now this produced hiccups during gameplay but not enough for me to reduce the resolution. Obviously for others this may not be acceptable, hence you are stuck playing at the 1024 x 768 resolution with NO AA. And this really reduces the beauty of this game. This game is just gorgeous at the higher resolutions.
Now let's see how high we can overclock this card.