GeForce 7900 GTX Roundup

Age of Empires III

Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios

We have used the full retail version of Age Of Empires III, patched to version 1.05. The game has a wide install base, supporting everything from the latest Shader Model 3.0 video cards, such as Radeon X1800XT and GeForce 7800 GTX, right back to fixed-function video cards that supported DirectX 7.0, like the GeForce 2.

Ensemble Studios have concentrated on making the game look as good as possible - we'd argue that this is currently the best looking game on the market. The attention to detail is simply outstanding.

The developers have also implemented high-dynamic range lighting, but it appears to look more like a bloom effect. HDR allows scenes to look much more natural because the lights can be brighter and the shadows can be darker, while maintaining a high level of detail, too. Turning the "Bloom" HDR option on really makes the world look impressively dreamy and realistic.

We did a manual run through from the tutorial, followed by a skirmish in order to evaluate the real game performance at certain resolution and detail settings. We found that there was a massive performance hit from enabling Anti-Aliasing, so we have left it disabled in this case. An average of 30 fps and a minimum of 10 fps seemed to be reasonably playable through the skirmishes, which are generally pretty intensive.

The BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC wasn't noticeably faster than the reference clocked MSI and ASUS cards in this title, as both cards were best-playable at 1920x1200 0xAA 16xAF with maximum details and high quality driver settings. The frame rate increased slightly on the BFG Tech, with the most notable improvement being a minimum frame rate increase from 13 to 15 fps.

When we enabled antialiasing on the GeForce 7900 GTX, we found that we had to reduce the resolution in order to attain a smooth frame rate. We felt that the difference made by antialiasing on NVIDIA's hardware was subtle at best, and it didn't look quite as good as we were expecting. As a result of this, we felt that the higher resolution delivered a better experience on the GeForce 7900 GTX.

Of course, the Radeon X1900XT and Radeon X1900XTX both support HDR and antialiasing, meaning that we were able to apply antialiasing without much of a performance hit. We were able to play the game at 1920x1200 with 2xAA 16xHQ AF and maximum in-game details, including HDR bloom. The Radeon X1900XTX was able to maintain a smooth frame rate with performance adaptive antialiasing applied too. Sapphire's X1900XTX gave a relatively unparalleled gaming experience in Age of Empires III in all honesty - the image quality was damn good.