With Nvidia re-taking the ‘fastest graphics for a single slot’ crown with its dual-PCB, dual-GPU 7950 GX2, Ati was bound to react. It’s chosen a fairly conservative route by attaching GDDR4 RAM to a standard X1900 XTX and running these new modules at a whopping 1GHz. This huge 65GB/s data link between memory and GPU will help when using hi-res textures, but we were curious to see by how much.
As expected we saw some speed gain over the X1900 XTX, but not in both tests. When testing at 1600 x 1200 with our toughest settings, Far Cry rose by eight per cent from a 53fps to a 57fps average. Call of Duty 2 (CoD2) saw a huge increase in our High Settings test, up twenty-nine percent from 41fps to 53. This test uses the Extra textures of CoD2 which require 512MB of local memory, so the extra RAM-to-GPU bandwidth is really pushed. The great news is that this 5% to 29% performance boost comes at no extra cost over the X1900 XTX. We found this Sapphire card on sale for a bargain $664 from
MSY.
However, when comparing it to the 7950 GX2 things change slightly. For a start the cheapest 7950 GX2 we could find was $770 at
Gamedude, around 16 percent more expensive. This card scores 66fps and 50fps in Far Cry and CoD2 respectively at the same settings. This translates into a 16% speed advantage over the X1950 XTX in Far Cry but is 6% slower in CoD2. The X1950 XTX also features AVIVO video enhancement and video transcoder (though it’s not HDCP compatible like the 7950 GX2) and can use HDR and antialiasing at the same time. Best of all, this is the quietest heatsink we’ve seen in a while on a high-end card: enthusiasts will notice the likeness to HIS’ IceQ system, and indeed Ati has licensed it. This will be appreciated even more by those purchasing an X1950 XTX CrossFire Edition card for a dual X1950 XTX gaming PC.
Sapphire includes The Da Vinci Code game and PowerDirector 4 DE. It’s worth labouring the point that this card is only for those playing games at 1600 x 1200 with full detail settings. If you’ve a 17-inch or 19-inch LCD, limited to a 1280 x 1024, you’ll be wasting your money. However, another issue for gamers is the imminent release of DirectX 10 with compatible cards expected to arrive in around two months’ time. The leap in visual quality will be amazing from the tech demos we’ve seen. That’s not to say that this card won’t run the new DirectX10 games, though; it will, and fast, so it’s a great choice if you must buy now.
