ATI Radeon X1900XT 256MB

24" Widescreen Gaming:

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

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 forced anisotropic filtering values via the console using "image_anisotropy".

We did a manual run through from a five minute section of the Nexus Hub Tunnels level and found that a minimum of 15 frames per second and an average of 45-50 frames per second in our test section was deemed to be playable across the rest of the title.

The Radeon X1900XT 256MB delivered a very similar gaming experience to its 512MB brother at 1920x1200, although we experienced more severe hitching than we did on the Radeon X1900XT 512MB. This wasn't good enough to take the performance crown away from the GeForce 7950 GT though, with XFX's card providing the best gaming experience out of the bunch.

High quality anisotropic filtering didn't make much difference in this title, but since disabling it didn't prevent the hitching problems from happening, we decided to leave it enabled since you're likely to have it turned on for all of your other games anyway. With that said, the fact that we had smoother frame rates, better anti-aliasing quality and reasonably comparable filtering quality, the XFX GeForce 7950 GT 570M Extreme was a clear winner here.