ATI Radeon X1950XTX

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Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter:

Publisher: Ubisoft

We used the latest addition to Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon series - Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter and patched the game to version 1.21. This has to be one of the best-looking games on the market at the moment, even despite its lack of support for anti-aliasing on any of today's current hardware. The game makes use of High Dynamic Range lighting and a whole plethora of special effects. Probably the biggest talking point for Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter is its support for AGEIA's PhysX PPU.

The lack of support for anti-aliasing may seem like a backwards step in image quality, as there are many areas of the game that could certainly benefit from a multisample anti-aliasing pattern. The lack of anti-aliasing support is due to the fact that the game uses multiple render targets to achieve some of the advanced graphical effects. This is due to the way that the DirectX 9.0 specification was set out, and even if multiple render targets and anti-aliasing could work in harmony, it'd be incredibly costly because every surface in the multiple render target would need to be sampled.

We did a five minute manual run through from the start of the Strong Point level. This incorporates lots of post processing effects, HDR lighting, explosions, gun fire and water, too in order to give the graphics subsystem a good work out. The game has no support for anti-aliasing, but anisotropic filtering was controlled from inside the game.

The BFGTech GeForce 7950 GX2 delivered a better gaming experience in Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, as we were able to turn up the in-game quality settings to their maximum values, including GRIN's recently-added 'edge smoothing'. It is listed as anti-aliasing, but it doesn't do much in heavily aliased areas - it only seems to scratch the surface in terms of getting rid of all aliased objects.

We were able to play the game with maximum in-game details on the Radeon X1950XTX, minus GRIN's edge smoothing option. GRAW doesn't really suffer from texture shimmering, so the benefits of high quality anisotropic filtering were not as apparent in this title. However, we would say that the textures were sharper at the same anisotropic filtering setting. Thus, the Radeon X1950XTX delivered a better gaming experience than the BFGTech GeForce 7900 GTX OC in this particular title.