Gaming Benchmarks (Cont.)

As we had some extra time and really enjoyed playing with the PowerColor Radeon X1950 PRO 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 2.80GHz - 2GB RAM
	Radeon X1950 PRO			GeForce 7900 GS
	Min	Avg	Max	Min	Avg	Max
No AA/No AF	30 fps	49 fps	96 fps	28 fps	44 fps	83 fps
2x AA/4x AF	26 fps	44 fps	78 fps	21 fps	36 fps	64 fps
4x AA/8x AF	19 fps	35 fps	66 fps	18 fps	29 fps	56 fps
Results Interpretation: Higher index values are better.

Just like Far Cry, F.E.A.R. is one of those games that has taken everyone by surprise. 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 PRO is clearly the winner when it comes to raw gaming power. The GeForce 7900 GS can keep up at the start, but can't keep up when AntiAliasing and Anisotropic Filtering is enabled. With stunning performance, excellent game play and outstanding image quality the Radeon X1950 PRO 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 2.80GHz - 2GB RAM
	Radeon X1950 PRO	GeForce 7900 GS
3dsmax-04	14.24	16.98
catia-02	16.09	14.82
ensight-03	13.69	10.09
light-08	14.59	15.66
maya-02	18.72	24.75
proe-04	9.67	10.79
sw-01	19.33	19.21
ugnx-01	11.42	2.44
tcvis-01	4.53	2.40
Results Interpretation: Higher index values are better.

Again 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 PRO does show some nice scores, although we have to be fair and state the same for the NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GS graphics card. In the end the Radeon X1950 PRO comes out on top, which is only logic due to core being clocked at 595MHz against only 450MHz on the GeForce 7900 GS. The raw power coming from the GPU clearly made the difference.