EVGA e-GeForce 7900 GT KO Superclock

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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 1.10. 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.

In order to get the EVGA e-GeForce 7900 GT KO Superclock running at above 1360x768, we had to make some config file adjustments. Due to the sheer amount of texture memory used by higher resolutions and the high texture setting, GRIN locked the modes out. However, there is a workaround if you know how to edit configuration files. If you find 'renderer_settings.xml' in the '\Data\settings' folder in the root directory for your GRAW installation, you will be able to change both the resolution and the texture quality.

Setting the texture quality to high on the GeForce 7900 GT resulted in an unplayable experience with poor frame rates if the resolution was set above 1280x1024 - this explains why there was no option to enable it in the config file. However, we found that changing the resolution didn't affect the experience too much.

At 1600x1200, we found that we could play GRAW with the medium texture setting enabled. Dynamic lighting was enabled and Effects, Post Effects and Dynamic Shadows were all set to high. These settings were the highest-available settings for the GeForce 7900 GT, and it played pretty smoothly - the frame rate didn't drop too low, and there were very few occasions where the frame rate was stuck below 30 frames per second for more than a second or two.

We didn't have the same problems with the Radeon X1900XT, as it has a 512MB frame buffer. Thus, we were able to turn on high quality textures. Dynamic lighting was also enabled and Effects were set to high. However, in order to achieve a smooth gaming experience, we had to lower Dynamic Shadows and Post Effects to low and medium respectively.