First Look: AMD's 690 series chipset

640x480 Testing

Whilst 640x480 is a pitiful resolution, it's still a bottom end resolution that is unable to be achieved at a reasonable frame rate by a Call of Duty. We kept the detail settings as the same as all our other testing to provide a direct apples-to-apples comparison with all our other benchmarks, despite the fact you can drop the detail level down to medium or low to achieve better frame rates.

Despite the fact the X1300 also has four pixel pipelines, four ROPs, it also has four vertex shading units unlike the RS690. It was underclocked to the same 400MHz core and memory speeds but the X1300 has twice the memory bandwidth as well as dedicated 256MB DDR2, so it doesn't have to request memory access through the CPU like RS690 does.

Quake 4 is barely playable at these settings, and while Half-Life 2 runs fine. Despite this, it's fully DirectX 9 capable, unlike Intel's G965 which refused to run both Call of Duty and Half-Life 2. Only because Quake 4 is OpenGL it ran it, but the frame rates were completely unplayable.