EVGA e-GeForce 7900 GT KO Superclock

For gameplay evaluations on a 24" widescreen monitor, please head straight to our widescreen performance section.

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.

As we mentioned in our CRT performance section, we had to manually force 1920x1200 on the EVGA GeForce 7900 GT KO Superclock because the maximum option available in-game was 1360x768. We tried to play G.R.A.W. with medium Texture Detail at 1920x1200 but found that it wasn't particularly smooth - there were several occasions where the frame rate dropped below 20 fps.

In order to attain a smooth gaming experience on the EVGA e-GeForce 7900 GT KO Superclock, we had to use low texture details, along with low Dynamic Shadows and Post Effects. We could leave Dynamic Lights enabled, and the Effects quality was set to medium. When using a Radeon X1900XT, we were able to set Texture Detail to medium, while the other effects were left set at the same settings used by the EVGA GeForce 7900 GT.