Gaming Benchmarks (Cont.)

You thought it was finished...didn't you? Well, since we had some extra time and really enjoyed playing with the PowerColor Radeon X1950 XTX video card, it was only logic to include an extra game. Since F.E.A.R. has the possibility to be run as a benchmark, we just downloaded the multiplayer demo version and took it for a spin. It has been developed by Monolith, using their 3D gaming engine for rendering the scenery. To this end they created an entirely new physics system built upon technology from Havok and a renderer built around the concepts of materials, shaders and meshes.

To finish of our gaming performance we couldn't just leave F.E.A.R. out of our real gaming experience results. F.E.A.R. is a shooter that captures the sensation of being in wild and desperate firefights like no other game before it, and it's an incredible, kinetic, almost exhausting experience from start to finish. More than that, though, is the fact that it's also one of the most atmospheric and creepy games ever made, as well as one of the most intense shooters that you'll play this year.

F.E.A.R. - 1280x980 Gaming Results

Gaming Results - 1280x980 - E6300 2.56GHz - 2GB RAM
	Radeon X1950 XTX			GeForce 7900 GT
	Min	Avg	Max	Min	Avg	Max
No AA/No AF	33 fps	64 fps	134 fps	30 fps	49 fps	96 fps
2x AA/4x AF	31 fps	59 fps	111 fps	22 fps	39 fps	71 fps
4x AA/8x AF	27 fps	51 fps	99 fps	12 fps	24 fps	45 fps
4x AA/16X AF	24 fps	49 fps	93 fps	11 fps	22 fps	44 fps

Just like Far Cry, F.E.A.R. is one of those games that has taken everyone by surprise. Just like Far Cry, there are two things which make F.E.A.R. stand out from the crowd, a gimmicky but genuinely fun twist and amazing graphics. Performance wise the Radeon X1950 XTX is clearly the winner when it comes to raw gaming power. The GeForce 7900 GT can't keep up from the start and gets behind even faster when Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering is enabled. With stunning performance, excellent game play and outstanding image quality the Radeon X1950 XTX shows that the game is on once again.

OpenGL Performance

SPECviewperf is a portable OpenGL performance benchmark program. It was developed by IBM and later updates and significant contributions were made by SGI, Digital, 3Dlabs and other SPECopc project group members. SPECviewperf provides a vast amount of flexibility in benchmarking OpenGL performance. SPECviewperf parses command lines and data files, sets the rendering state, and converts data sets to a format that can be traversed using OpenGL rendering calls. It renders the data set for a pre-specified amount of time or number of frames with animation between frames. Finally, it outputs the results.

SPECViewperf® 9 - OpenGL Results

OpenGL Results - 1280x1024 - E6300 2.56GHz - 2GB RAM
	Radeon X1950 XTX	GeForce 7900 GT
3dsmax-04	12.58	15.49
catia-02	14.69	14.21
ensight-03	12.64	10.08
light-08	13.34	14.38
maya-02	17.14	23.47
proe-04	9.13	9.82
sw-01	18.49	19.21
ugnx-01	10.32	2.46
tcvis-01	4.39	2.35

This is the first time we used the SPECViewperf software to provide us some more application performance figures and rendering speed. As these are different applications that are run to compile the results there are some wins on both sides. The PowerColor Radeon X1950 XTX does show some decent scores, although we have to be fair and state the same for the NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT graphics card. In the end the Radeon X1950 XTX comes out on top, which is only logic due to core being clocked at 650MHz against only 450MHz on the GeForce 7900 GT. The raw power coming from the GPU makes the difference.