Date:
Tuesday , February 20, 2007
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
Google +1

Sapphire Radeon X1950 GT

Sapphire Technology is the first and only add-in-board partner with a video card using the new ATI Radeon X1950 GT GPU. Does the Radeon X1950 GT have what it takes to run with the big boys? This $150 video card is full of surprises.

continued...

Test Setup

For our system platform setup we are using the Gigabyte GA-965O-DS3 with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 processor at 1.86 GHz and 2 GB of OCZ DDR2-800 RAM. We are evaluating the Sapphire Radeon X1950 GT 256 MB GDDR3 PCI-Express video card against the NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GS 256 MB GDDR3 PCI-Express video card.

Article Image

All three video cards were tested at their default frequencies, as you can see above. We also used the latest drivers officially available 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.

Wherever possible, we try to force anti-aliasing (AA) and anisotropic texture filtering (AF) from the video cards' respective control panels. Our experience has shown that using control panel options, as opposed to in-game options, usually results in better image quality and less "texture crawling". Therefore, in this article, wherever you see us use AF or AA in the table, and the in-game configuration screenshot does not reflect those AA or AF settings, we are forcing that feature from the control panel.

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 cards.