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FarCry

To make it easier for a detailed comparison, we have a number of FarCry benchmarks using the exact same settings for the PCIe and the AGP version. Detailed descriptions of the workload are available in our earlier review of the PCIe card. Briefly, we ran the River, Pier and Volcano level benchmarks as provided by HardwareOC's tool at different resolutions and AA / AF settings for what may come close to an apples to apples comparison of the AGP and PCIe versions of Sapphire's X1950 Pro card. Keep in mind that the different sizes of frame buffer on the two cards will have an impact on performance, particularly at high resolution.

One issue to point out is that the ATI Catalyst Control Center only provides for up to 6x AntiAliasing whereas the HWOC tool offers up to 8x AA. We DO NOT KNOW exactly what it is that the setting invokes but there is an effect on performance and since we were at it, we decided to show the data anyway. The legends throughout provide Anisotropic filtering first, followed by the level of AntiAliasing so that e.g. 16+4 means 16x AF and 4x AA.

Pier

The spread of results is rather close for the different filter settings making it sometimes dofficult to see what exactly the impact of antialiasing on perfpormance is. To make it easier, we replotted the same data as a function of filter setting at the different resolutions.

What is obvious is that the PCIe card is much more sensitive to the the extra load of AA and AF than the AGP card. Interestingly, the AGP card is overall a bit faster, too, especially at 1280x1024 and 4+4, where we are looking at 50.6 vs. 38.4 fps - a 32% lead for the AGP card. Please note that the AGP benchmark graphs also contain results for 1600 x 1200 that are missing from the PCIe graphs. Unfortunately, Aaron is on a long deserved Christmas vacation, so he couldn't rerun the same benchmarks at 1600 x 1200 in time.

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