ATI Radeon X1950XTX

For gameplay evaluations on a CRT, please head back 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 1.3 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'.

The Radeon X1950XTX delivered a very good gaming experience at 1920x1200, as we were able to turn 6x quality adaptive AA on along with 8x HQ AF. Gaming was silky smooth at these settings and we also had a session of BF2 on a 64-player server with the same in-game quality settings - even online, we found the gameplay to still be very smooth.

The GeForce 7950 GX2 was amazingly still playable with 8x transparency supersampling AA enabled. Again, we tried these settings online, and were surprised to find them still reasonably playable. There were a few times when the frame rate suffered a little, but most importantly, it didn't drop below 25fps during online play.

As we mentioned before, the differences between 8x AA and 6x AA were very small. Differences in filtering quality were a bit more pronounced though, with the ball firmly in ATI's court on that front.