PowerColor Radeon X1950 Pro SCS3

Quake 4

Publisher: Activision

We used the full retail version of Quake 4 patched to version 1.3.0. It is the fourth game in the Quake series, based on the technically sound Doom 3 engine. However, unlike Doom 3, we found that the game benefits from at least 2x anti-aliasing, and the experience with anti-aliasing at a slightly lower resolution was better than increasing the resolution with no AA applied.

Both anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were controlled from inside the game. When you select "High Quality" mode, 4xAF is automatically enabled, and when the "Ultra Quality" mode is enabled, 8xAF is automatically applied to the scene.

We used a custom-recorded demo from a section that represents fairly typical performance throughout the rest of the game. We set the in-game details to high quality and left Vsync disabled. Both anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were controlled inside the game using console commands. Anti-aliasing was adjusted using the "r_multisamples" cvar, while anisotropic filtering values were set using "image_anisotropy".







The second chink in the Radeon X1950 Pro's armour comes from Quake 4. This is despite ATI's continued efforts to improve its OpenGL driver. In that respect, we're not sure whether this is going to change anytime soon. Also, it's been an area where Nvidia has always been pretty strong, too, which just make's ATI's job a little harder.

With that said though, PowerColor's X1950 Pro SCS3 is hardly a slouch in Quake 4 and manages to maintain decent frame rates right the way up to 1920x1200 2xAA 8xAF with High Quality texture detail selected. However, it's almost always slower than Nvidia's reference-clocked GeForce 7900 GS, and it's always slower than Inno3D's 7900 GS iChiLL and, of course, Nvidia's GeForce 7900 GT.