Radeon X1900-series roundup

Battlefield 2

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Battlefield 2 features an all-new game engine based on the DirectX 9.0 API. There is no Shader Model 3.0 support, but the majority of hardware will use a Shader Model 2.0++ mode that includes support for Normal Maps, Parallax Mapping, Full-Resolution Dynamic Shadowing, Post Processing and Fog.

The game will look the same on both NVIDIA and ATI hardware, so there is no advantage of choosing one over the other in image quality related circumstances. The only major difference is that Ultra Shadow 2 is utilised on NVIDIA's hardware, while the shadowing on ATI hardware is done using a slightly different technique.

We played three five-minute segments of the 'Strike at Karkand' map, reporting the median frame rate. We found that there was no ready way to duplicate testing situations manually in this game, so we felt that taking a typical slice of action from the game was the best way to report our findings. We controlled Anti-Aliasing from inside the game, while Anisotropic Filtering was set to 8xAF when the 'Texture Filtering' option was set to 'High'.

Below is a table of the best-playable settings that we found best for each video card configuration. In this title, we found that 25 frames per second minimum and a target of 55 frames per second (or higher) for the average frame rate delivered a good gaming experience on these video cards.

As was the case in Day of Defeat: Source, we found that we had to lower the adaptive antialiasing quality on the Radeon X1900XT in order to attain a smooth gaming experience. We had to drop to 'performance' adaptive AA, which made some small and subtle differences to fences and vegetation, but the gaming experience was relatively unchanged at 2048x1536 4xAA 8xHQ AF with maximum in-game details.

The GeForce 7800 GTX 512 was not quite as fast as the Radeon X1900XT, as we found that its highest playable settings were 2048x1536 2xTSS AA 8xAF with high quality driver details and maximum in-game details. Battlefield 2 is a game where high quality driver details are required to remove some apparent texture shimmering from the terrain - there are some scenarios where the texture filtering can look pretty rash with default driver settings.

Again, the All-In-Wonder X1900 had to take a resolution drop, as we found that we were unable to attain smooth gameplay at 2048x1536 with maximum details and antialiasing enabled. We found that 1600x1200 2xQAAA 8xHQ AF with maximum in-game details were the optimal settings for this card in Battlefield 2.