GeForce 7950 GX2 Retail Round-up

For gameplay evaluations on a CRT, please head back to our CRT 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.

Again, both speed grades for the GeForce 7950 GX2 were capable of playing G.R.A.W. at the maximum in-game settings with 16xAF applied too. There were small differences in the smoothness of gameplay, but you would be pushed to notice the difference in a blind taste test. The reference clocked GeForce 7950 GX2 was more than comfortable at playing G.R.A.W. without issue at the maximum settings - the frame rate only dropped below 30 frames per second on a single occasion during our manual run through.

We had to lower the in game details on both the BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC and Sapphire Radeon X1900XTX in order to attain a smooth and playable frame rate. The texture detail had to be reduced to medium, while dynamic shadows and post processing effects had to be reduced to low. Dynamic lighting was still enabled, and effects were still set to the highest setting.