Date:
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
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Sapphire RADEON X1650 XT

Can Sapphire's new X1650 XT take a bite out of the GeForce 7600 GT's market domination? We show you what you can expect out of your X1650 XT and 7600 GT in real world gameplay. You might be surprised what we see out of ATI's new "sub-$150" video card.

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System Test Setup:

For our system platform setup we are using the ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe with an AMD Athlon-64 3500+ and 1GB of Corsair XMS DDR400 RAM. We are evaluating the Sapphire RADEON X1650 XT Silent 256 MB video card against the NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT 256 MB video card.

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Video Cards

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Both video cards were tested at their default frequencies as you can see above. We used the latest drivers at the time of evaluation.

Game and Video Card Evaluation Setup

Please be aware we test our video cards a bit differently from what is the norm. We concentrate on examining the real-world gameplay that each video card provides. The Highest Playable section shows the best Image Quality delivered at a playable frame rate. We use a high performance system, with a very fast CPU in order to remove CPU bottlenecking.

In our graphs we use some abbreviations to indicate the method of AA or AF being used.

In our graphs, we use some abbreviations to indicate the method of AA or AF being used.

AD AA = Adaptive AA – Indicates the use of ATI’s Adaptive AA on X1000 series video cards.

HQ AF = High Quality Anisotropic Filtering – Indicates the use of ATI’s High Quality option for Anisotropic Filtering that is not angle dependent.

TR MSAA = Transparency Multisampling Antialiasing – Indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency Multisampling quality setting on GeForce 7 series video cards.

TR SSAA = Transparency Supersampling Antialiasing – Indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency Supersampling quality setting on GeForce 7 series video card