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The Test Bed

Our tests will be limited, as a proper high-end setup was unavailable at the time of review. Fortunately, Scott Wasson at The Tech Report tested everything including the kitchen sink in his recent write-up of the Nvidia G80/8800 series. Well, maybe not the blow drier. For an all-else-equal comparison of how an X1950 Pro performs generally amongst all recent competition, we would recommend consulting that article.

Our goal is to see whether this middle-end card, in a middle-end system, can provide adequate gaming performance without sacrificing image quality and features to the wolves. Our performance-determining system specs are:

• Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro 256MB PCIe
• AMD AthlonFX-55
• DFI LanPartyUT NF4
• 2 x 1024MB OCZ Value 3-4-4-8 DDR installed as dual-channel
• Maxtor DiamondMax 250GB 7200RPM 8MB IDE
• Windows XP Professional 32-bit

Our test applications are:

• 3DMark 2005 (freeware version)
• 3DMark 2006 (freeware version)
• HardwareOC’s FarCry Bench (version 1.7)
• HardwareOC’s HL2 Bench (version 1.9)

For all tests, we started with a normal boot and then fired shots at the system tray. The firewall and antivirus software took direct hits and did not get up again until the next reboot. For all tests except HalfLife2, we also shut down Steam.

Futuremark’s 3DMark05 tests tended to produce the best result after a clean boot, so we took the highest figure obtained in several reboot-and-run attempts. 3DMark06 results tended to cluster in a ten-point spread regardless, so we took a representative sample. Both test suites operate upon a similar test routine, but the 2006 version adds SM3.0 support, a higher default resolution, High Dynamic Range (HDR) lighting, and more. (For more details, check out the chart from an earlier review here.)

FarCry is not new, but it was the first game to fully support SM2.0, one of the first to add SM3.0 enhancements, and it has since been updated to support HDR. HardwareOC has built a time-saving benchmarking front-end for it and that will be used here.

HalfLife2 is also starting to age, but Valve has prevented wrinkles via new features and content. HDR was first explored in the Lost Coast demo map, and is now fully supported in the game’s expansions. HardwareOC has also compiled a benchmark front-end for HalfLife2 but since Episode 1 support is not yet available, we’ll have to work with a Lost Coast demo in order to include HDR effects.

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