GeCube Radeon X1800XT 512MB

Age of Empires III

Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios

We have used the full retail version of Age Of Empires III, patched to version 1.01. The game has a wide install base, supporting everything from the latest Shader Model 3.0 video cards, such as Radeon X1800XT and GeForce 7800 GTX, right back to fixed-function video cards that supported DirectX 7.0, like the GeForce 2.

Ensemble Studios have concentrated on making the game look as good as possible - we'd argue that this is currently the best looking game on the market. The attention to detail is simply outstanding.

The developers have also implemented high-dynamic range lighting, but it appears to look more like a bloom effect. HDR allows scenes to look much more natural because the lights can be brighter and the shadows can be darker, while maintaining a high level of detail, too. Turning the bloom HDR option on really makes the world look impressively dreamy and realistic.

We did a manual run through from the tutorial, followed by a skirmish in order to evaluate the real game performance at certain resolution and detail settings. We found that there was a massive performance hit from enabling antialiasing, so we have left it disabled in this case. An average of 30 fps and a minimum of 10 fps seemed to be reasonably playable through the skirmishes, which are generally pretty intensive.

Age of Empires III makes use of a large amount of mathematical functions, meaning that the additional pixel processors inside R580 can be used to improve the gaming experience. The GeCube Radeon X1800XT was capable of playing the game at 1280x1024 2xQA AA 16xAF with maximum details and HDR enabled, while the lower-clocked All-In-Wonder X1900 delivered a smooth gaming experience with 4xAA 16xHQ AF at the same resolution. This proves that clock speed isn't everything in this title.

The GeForce 7800 doesn't support HDR and antialiasing at the same time, so we were forced to run the game at a higher resolution instead of enabling antialiasing. We found that Gainward's 7800 GTX was playable at 1600x1200 0xAA 16xAF with high quality driver settings, maximum in-game details and HDR enabled.

This delivered a pretty good gaming experience, but we'd choose to take antialiasing and a slighly lower resolution over the higher resolution that we were able to use on Gainward's card. In this case, bigger numbers aren't always best - we felt that the All-In-Wonder X1900 delivered the highest-quality gameplay out of the three video cards with a similar price tag.

The PowerColor Radeon X1900XT is a little more expensive, but we found that we were able to play the game at the same resolution as Gainward's Ultra/3500PCX Golden Sample but with antialiasing enabled at the same time as HDR. Along with that, we found that we were able to enable high quality anisotropic filtering too.