Visiontek Radeon X1950 Pro AGP Review 12/21/06
GamingReviewTechnology
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Now for the benchmark results, here’s the system used for benchmarking:

  • AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 1.8GHz overclocked to 2.48GHz processor
  • MSI K8T Neo-2 FIR VIA K8T800 motherboard
  • Corsair XMS 1GB PC3200 DDR400 memory
  • Visiontek XGE Radeon X1950 Pro 256MB AGP & PNY Verto GeForce 6800GT 256MB AGP
  • Dell UltraSharp 2005FPW 20.1″ Widescreen monitor
  • Creative Audigy 2 ZS soundcard
  • Thermaltake PurePower Xaser 480w PSU

A few notes;  1680×1050 is the highest resolution my monitor supports.  I also used 1024×768 and when you see AA and AF, it means Antialiasing and Anisotropic Filtering respectively.

For this benchmark, everything was set to the highest setting (high for some settings, ultra for those that accepts it.)  Here we can see that the X1950 Pro is being limited by my processor, and it also more than doubles the performance over the GeForce 6800GT.

Both Computer and Video settings were set to Maximum.  At 1024×768, once again my processor holds back the Radeon X1950 Pro.  At the higher 1680×1050 resolution, however, it gets some legroom to work with, doubling the performance over the GeForce 6800GT once again.

For this benchmark, all settings were maxxed out, and HDR was enabled.  One important thing to note here is that the GeForce 6800GT is using 4xAA and 16xAF, while the Radeon X1950 Pro is using 6xAA and 16xAF, and even then the X1950 Pro was able to outdistance the aging 6800GT.

The High setting was used here, not Ultra (as Ultra is more reserved for cards with 512MB of memory.)  Quake 4, using the Doom 3 engine, is quite intensive.  It is interesting to note that the GeForce 6800GT seems to hang in there even at the highest resolution and detail settings.

AA was not enabled, but HDR is.  Once again the Radeon X1950 Pro stood out on top, although this time it didn’t double in performance over the GeForce 6800GT like in some other games.

For other games, my subjective experience resembled some of the benchmarks above, where the Radeon X1950 Pro effectively doubled the performance in games at the highest resolution with AA and AF enabled. 

Games that used to give me fits in the performance department are now smoother and more enjoyable — this includes Neverwinter Nights 2 which now allows me to play at my native 1680×1050 resolution with shadows enabled, whereas before I had to play at 1024×768 with shadows off.

The same could be said for Medieval II Total War, where I had to play at pretty low settings with the GeForce 6800GT.  Now I can crank the details up much higher, and play at my native resolution.


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