Back to Page 3 Microsoft’s Flight Simulator 2004 was configured with high settings enabled across its four display panels, with the max texture slider set at full and hardware lights at four. SimHQ’s demo is a short dusk flight over Hong Kong city. FS2004 testing resulted in a fairly even performance field, with the 5000+ failing […]
Back to Page 2 Game Benchmark Scores As a watershed title for multi-processing support, SimHQ enjoys making heavy use of Falcon 4: Allied Force for dual-core testing. The two mission tests that are used in this article can be found here and the simulation itself was patched with the 1.0.6 update. Because of the rather aged nature of […]
Back to Page 1 Test System Setup AMD Socket AM2 AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 (2.8 GHz dual core) AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ (2.6 GHz dual core) ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe (nForce 590 chipset) 2 GB (4 x 512MB) of Corsair DDR2/800 XMS2 Pro (4-4-4-12) memory AMD Socket 939 AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 (2.6 GHz […]
by John Reynolds Introduction With the launch of the Athlon 64s in late 2003, AMD was able to firmly wrest the gaming performance crown away from Intel, though the aging Pentium 4 architecture’s hyper-threaded design still put up a tough scrap in media and multi-tasking chores. Yet with the introduction of dual-core processors last year, […]
Back to Page 6 Conclusions The Radeon X1900 XTX is selling online for well over $500 as of late April, placing the part squarely in the high-end bracket. ATI has paired these 650 MHz cores with high-speed RAM, Samsung’s 1.1ns GDDR3 modules, creating the fastest, arguably most feature-rich, graphics card currently available on the market. […]
Back to Page 5 rFactor was tested with a custom demo recorded on the Sardian Heights race track. The DX9 shader profile was selected for all tests. Worth noting is that the configuration tool lists rFactor’s application support for anti-aliasing as a super-sampling scheme. rFactor returns the test scores back to the previous pattern of […]
Back to Page 4 Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory was tested using the Lighthouse demo. The shader profile for SM2.0 was used and options such as parallax mapping and high quality soft shadows were enabled. A more graphically intense title than the three flight simulations tested, Chaos Theory shows a larger performance delta between the two […]
Back to Page 3 Pacific Fighters was run in OpenGL mode with all video options set to high (landscape at perfect) and tested using the “F4Utt” track. The conf.ini file was edited to enable the two non-4:3 ratio resolutions of 1280×1024 and 1920×1200. ATI boards perform better in IL2 games in D3D mode, but we […]
Back to Page 2 Benchmark Test Scores SimHQ included Futuremark’s 3DMark06 for examining the theoretical raster and shader performance characteristics of the two graphics boards. The individual fill rate (multi-texturing) and pixel and vertex (complex) shader tests were ran at the program’s default resolution of 1280×1024. X1800 XT X1900 XTX Fill Rate 9910 MT/s […]
Back to Page 1 The Boards – Power In and Sound Out Both test boards use the same cooling solution from ATI, a dual-slot heatsink / fan combo that hasn’t exactly garnered high praise among system builders concerned with overall system sound levels. It is somewhat surprising that ATI didn’t improve the X1900 boards […]
by John Reynolds Introduction The graphics market has traditionally seen product refreshes occur at a fairly static pace. A new architecture upon which a generation of parts will be based is introduced, generally for the spring or fall OEM cycle, with a new part that is derivative of the existing architecture hitting the market just […]
Back to Page 2 Beggaring Achievement…Emphasis on Begging The accountant glared from behind her desk, her beautiful brown eyes flashing out the warning sign that all was not well with the news of the project having gone ‘over-budget”. “You want a what?” “A better processor, ma’am. The original deal didn’t work out. They sold me […]
