ATI Radeon X1900 family

Day of Defeat: Source

Publisher: Valve

We used the popular remake of the World War II online multiplayer, Day of Defeat: Source, which uses Valve's implementation of high-dynamic range rendering. We did three five minute portions of real world game play on the dod_anzio map. We connected to three different public servers each with a ping of less than 30ms and 16-20 players in the game when we were recording the frame rates.

Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering were controlled from inside the game, and thus the drivers were left set to "Application Controlled". There are three options for the method of HDR used in this title. You can either disable HDR completely, make use of "Bloom" which is just what it says and less resource hungry in comparison to "Full" which, again is just what it says. It utilises a full dynamic range with the iris effect too.

We have written quite a bit about Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, Day of Defeat: Source and how Valve have implemented HDR in to the Source Engine. You can check out the articles listed below for more information on The Lost Coast & Day of Defeat: Source.

• Half-Life 2: Lost Coast HDR overview
  
• Half-Life 2: Lost Coast hands on
  
• Half-Life 2: Lost Coast Benchmarks & Video
  
• Day of Defeat: Source

Below is a table of the best-playable settings that we found best for each video card configuration. We found that 25 frames per second is the required minimum, and a target of 45-50 frames per second (or higher) is the average frame rate in our manual run throughs on these mainstream video cards.

The Radeon X1900XTX was considerably faster than the EVGA GeForce 7800 GTX 512 at 2048x1536 2x QAAA 16x HQ AF. Unfortunately, the Radeon X1900XTX was not quite fast enough to be able to play the game at 2048x1536 with 4x QAAA 16x HQ AF with maximum details. Incidentally, we tried out playing the game at 1600x1200 6x QAAA 16x HQ AF and found that it was completely smooth - smoother than we've ever experienced before on a single video card!

In fact, we felt that 1600x1200 with 6x QAAA 16x HQ AF actually looked better than 2048x1536 2x QAAA 16x HQ AF. Despite the lower resolution, we felt that the image quality was much higher, as 6x QAAA is going to remove more aliased edges at 1600x1200 than 2x QAAA is going to do at 2048x1536, despite the higher density pixels.

When we added the Radeon X1900 CrossFire Edition card, we found that we were able to increase the resolution to 2048x1536 with the same level of detail enabled, meaning that we were able to play the game incredibly smoothly with 6x QAAA 16x HQ AF enabled. We have never experienced Day of Defeat: Source with this kind of performance before - it's just breathtaking to be perfectly honest!

The GeForce 7800 GTX 512 SLI was slower than the Radeon X1900 CrossFire, as it was not fast enough to improve on the image quality delivered by the X1900 dual card configuration, despite having high quality driver settings enabled. In short, the gaming experience on the Radeon X1900 CrossFire configuration was far beyond anything else we've seen in Day of Defeat: Source.