ATI Radeon X1950XTX

For gameplay evaluations on a CRT, please head back 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 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.

Again, both of the Radeons suffered from the same stuttering problems that we documented on our CRT evaluation page at the native resolution on our 24" widescreen monitor. This time though, the Radeon X1900XTX really suffered - we saw a minimum frame rate of 1fps, which came at a time when we were in the middle of a firefight after just firing the grenade launcher for the first time. This happened again when we played another portion of the game a little bit later on, so it is not limited to our test section.

The Radeon X1950XTX delivered a better experience, despite only being at the same quality settings. The stuttering wasn't quite as bad, but it was still apparent - the gameplay experience wasn't as smooth as we found it to be on both of the NVIDIA GeForce 7-series video cards.