PowerColor Radeon X1950 Pro 256MB

24" Widescreen Gaming:

Battlefield 2

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Battlefield 2 features an all-new game engine based on the DirectX 9.0 API. There is no Shader Model 3.0 support, but the majority of hardware will use a Shader Model 2.0++ mode that includes support for Normal Maps, Parallax Mapping, Full-Resolution Dynamic Shadowing, Post Processing and Fog.

The game will look the same on both NVIDIA and ATI hardware, so there is no advantage of choosing one over the other in image quality related circumstances. The only major difference is that Ultra Shadow 2 is utilised on NVIDIA's hardware, while the shadowing on ATI hardware is done using a slightly different technique.

We patched the game to version 1.4 and then played three five-minute segments of the 'Strike at Karkand' map, reporting the median frame rate. We found that there was no ready way to duplicate testing situations manually in this game, so we felt that taking a typical slice of action from the game was the best way to report our findings. We controlled anti-aliasing from inside the game, while anisotropic filtering was set to 8xAF when the 'Texture Filtering' option was set to 'High'.


Both the PowerColor and Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro’s delivered the same gaming experience at 1920x1200. Although PowerColor’s card has slightly higher core speeds, this didn’t translate into much in terms of gameplay advantages. We were able to maintain smoother gameplay, which is always a good thing, but there were no image quality benefits on offer.

BFG Tech’s GeForce 7900 GS OC delivered very similar performance to the Radeon X1950 Pro’s, but it did so with a lower overall image quality. We enabled high quality driver settings on the two BFG Tech GeForce 7900-series cards to remove the texture shimmering that we’ve become accustomed to in Battlefield 2. Although this reduced the shimmering to a bare minimum, it didn’t remove it completely.

Finally, the Radeon X1900XT 256MB was the fastest of the cards tested here at 1920x1200. We were able to turn performance adaptive anti-aliasing on, along with high quality anisotropic filtering – this resulted in a pretty awesome gaming experience in Battlefield 2.