Date:
Monday , July 16, 2007
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
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ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT

The ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT is here for us to put it through its DX10 paces. Who will take home the crown in the first full DirectX 10 game under Windows Vista? New games including Oblivion: Shivering Isles, WoW: Burning Crusade, Lord of the Rings Online, and Lost Planet.

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Test Setup

For our test system platform we are using a Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 motherboard with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 processor at 2.4 GHz, and 2 GB of OCZ DDR2-800 RAM. We are evaluating the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256 MB GDDR4 PCI-Express video card against an XFX GeForce 8600 GT XXX 256 MB GDDR3 PCI-Express video card.

Article Image

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

Windows Vista

This is our first evaluation using Microsoft Windows Vista throughout the entire evaluation for a video card. The gaming capabilities of every version of Windows Vista are essentially the same, but we chose the 64-bit version of Vista Ultimate for maximum performance, extended memory support, and for the most capable out-of-the-box experience available.

We have made sure all Windows Updates are installed prior to testing since Microsoft does release application compatibility and stability fixes as well as performance fixes through Windows Update. We are also using the latest 64-bit driver versions from ATI and NVIDIA at the time of testing. Since Windows Vista brings with it support for the DirectX 10 API and we have two DirectX 10 capable video cards right here, we will test the first full version game to support DX10, Lost Planet.

While the 64-bit version of Vista was used for all the game testing, on our HD-DVD video performance testing page we used the 32-bit version of Vista since ATI drivers only currently support UVD under the 32-bit version of Vista. 64-bit support of UVD will come in a future driver.

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. For mainstream cards like we are evaluating here today, we are using a mainstream CPU.

Wherever possible, we use the in-game anti-aliasing (AA) and anisotropic texture filtering (AF) options. However, in several games the options are not there for high AA or AF levels that are supported by each video card. Therefore in these specific games we use the video cards' respective control panels to adjust AA and AF levels. 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.