ATI Radeon X1900XT 256MB

24" Widescreen Gaming:

For gameplay evaluations on a CRT monitor, please head straight to our CRT performance section.

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 patched the game to version 1.4 and then 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'.

Not surprisingly, the hitching problems we experienced during our CRT testing were still apparent when running Battlefield 2 at 1920x1200. This meant that there was no chance of using quality adaptive anti-aliasing on the Radeon X1900XT 256MB. However, we were pleased to find that the game was incredibly smooth with 4xAA and performance adaptive anti-aliasing applied. While this didn't deliver as good an experience as we got from the Radeon X1900XT 512MB, it wasn't all that far behind.

The XFX GeForce 7950 GT 570M Extreme also delivered a good gaming experience with arguably the best anti-aliasing quality in this game. However, the filtering quality wasn't up to the same standards as ATI's high quality anisotropic filtering, even with NVIDIA's high quality driver setting forced, so we would have to give the nod to the Radeon X1900XT 512MB in this title.