Gaming Benchmarks

As we saw the synthetic benchmark results, the next logical step is to dive into the real gaming performance of the Sapphire Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4 edition video card. As reference we will use a standard Radeon HD 2600 XT setup to check the performance differences. Each setup is going to run each game at different resolution settings using a variety of anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering 3D effects. We are using a variety of well known games which are quite popular amongst the gamer community. So in effect we are stuffing both cards in the same system, using the same settings and spending some time playing games and performing tests on the following game titles, let's check what we got...

UbiSoft Far Cry

Who doesn't know the game Far Cry? You should at least have heard about it... It's the game that came out right before Half-Life 2, Doom 3 and so on and set some new standards in gaming experience. Without a doubt, Far Cry was the most advanced graphics seen in any PC game. Everything in this game looks amazing, and the level of verisimilitude is unprecedented. Far Cry isn't just a stunning technical accomplishment. It's quite possibly the best single-player first-person shooter experience for the PC since Half-Life. Since Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 came out Far Cry had to share the welt on de gaming market.

Benchmark Results - 1280x1024 - E6300 2.80GHz - 2GB RAM
	Radeon HD 2600 XT	Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4
No AA/No AF	67.87 fps	72.38 fps
2x AA/4x AF	33.12 fps	34.94 fps
4x AA/8x AF	28.75 fps	30.23 fps
SM3.0/HDR	47.48 fps	50.77 fps
Results Interpretation: Higher index values are better.

Well yeah we still like the hang of it with Far Cry, it just keeps amazing us this game with very nice visual graphics and stunning game play. Besides that it is an excellent game to checkout the performance of a graphics card and it does provide some great features and nice visual effects. So what do the results show us? Well, somehow it confirms what we did expect from the GDDR4 version, meaning that it does beat standard Radeon HD 2600 XT easily. By using the better GDDR4 memory which allows greater clock speed and bandwidth does show that the RV630 chip has quite some potential which is restricted by the narrow memory interface. In fact it would have been a good opportunity to finally move to a 256-bit memory interface on the mid-range graphics card segment.

Benchmark Results - 1600x1200 - E6300 2.80GHz - 2GB RAM
	Radeon HD 2600 XT	Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4
4x AA/8x AF	21.27 fps	22.63 fps
SM3.0/HDR	35.37 fps	36.24 fps
Results Interpretation: Higher index values are better.
Benchmark Results - 2560x1600 - E6300 2.80GHz - 2GB RAM
	Radeon HD 2600 XT	Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4
4x AA/8x AF	11.22 fps	11.96 fps
SM3.0/HDR	16.25 fps	17.17 fps
Results Interpretation: Higher index values are better.

The new hype is all about the ultra widescreen gaming and that means very high resolutions to provide just that little extra gaming experience and feeling. That means we couldn't stay behind neither. And indeed ATI did re-brand their new graphics card series with the HD abbreviation in the naming of their graphics card products. So what does the Radeon HD 2600 XT bring in terms of HD gaming experience? Well, first of all we didn't have a good feeling about it and we did have it right. And although it does support the super high resolutions, that is as far as it goes. If you really want to enjoy the super resolutions, then Sapphire has as well the Radeon HD 2900 series to choose from. In the end we were quite impressed by the image clarity and quality, which has improved a lot over the previous series of graphics cards.

id Software Doom 3

Next on our list of favorite games is Doom 3 developed by id Software. Doom 3 is quite possibly the best-looking game ever, thanks to the brand-new 3D graphics engine used to generate its convincingly lifelike, densely atmospheric, and surprisingly expansive environments. At the same time, when you look past the spectacular appearance, you'll find a conventional, derivative shooter. Doom 3 is essentially a remake of the original Doom, though series fans will find reimagined versions of almost every monster from both previous versions in the new sequel.

Benchmark Results - 1280x1024 - E6300 2.80GHz - 2GB RAM
	Radeon HD 2600 XT	Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4
No AA/-- AF	81.6 fps	92.7 fps
2x AA/-- AF	58.0 fps	62.6 fps
4x AA/-- AF	46.4 fps	50.5 fps
8x AA/-- AF	24.9 fps	31.0 fps
Results Interpretation: Higher index values are better.

And here we are with the second gaming experience using the Radeon HD 2600 XT provided by Sapphire. In fact Doom 3 is already going a long way but is still considered a very good reference in terms of OpenGL gaming performance. The reported frame rates are in favor of the GDDR4 edition, which is gives higher results on each aspect of the gaming settings. The Radeon HD 2600 XT shows that it has quite a lot of processing power, although dropping behind in performance quite fast when anti-aliasing is enabled. This is exactly what we mean by the unpredictable performance towards the competition. Both cards use the same RV630 core and unified shader technology, by having their own version and logic of what is called stream processors responsible for various shader and pixel operations. The only difference is the type of memory chips used, which allows a higher data throughput and clock speed.

Benchmark Results - 1600x1200 - E6300 2.80GHz - 2GB RAM
	Radeon HD 2600 XT	Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4
4x AA/-- AF	33.7 fps	36.3 fps
Results Interpretation: Higher index values are better.
Benchmark Results - 2560x1600 - E6300 2.80GHz - 2GB RAM
	Radeon HD 2600 XT	Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4
4x AA/-- AF	17.3 fps	17.5 fps
Results Interpretation: Higher index values are better.

Going one step further and going for the higher resolutions we can see that the Radeon HD 2600 XT is capable of supporting the Extreme HD gaming experience but with an impact to the performance. When we would enable the extra features like anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering the Radeon HD 2600 XT is dropping in performance, which is somehow natural. In fact when the widescreen resolutions come into play the main player becomes the graphics core to a certain extend, and on that point the Radeon HD 2600 XT are similarly clocked at 800MHz core clock speed. We don't see these mid-range cards being used for the ultra high resolutions during game play but they have the capability if you take into account the performance drop. In the end we would leave the HD gaming up to the big boys who have been designed for that purpose.