Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro

24" Widescreen Gaming:

For gameplay evaluations on a CRT monitor, please head straight to our CRT performance section.

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'.

We found that the Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro delivered a very similar gaming experience to the BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GS OC at 1920x1200. We were able to play the game smoothly on a 32-player public server with 2xAA and 8xAF enabled, along with high quality anisotropic filtering. On the NVIDIA-based cards, we enabled high quality drivers in order to remove some of the texture shimmering that can be very distracting when running at the default driver quality settings.

The Radeon X1950 Pro was the slightly faster of the two sub-£150 cards, and the image quality was marginally better too – mainly down to ATI’s superior texture filtering quality. We tried playing online with some transparent texture anti-aliasing enabled. Both cards suffered with quality adaptive/transparency supersampling anti-aliasing enabled and while the BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GS OC delivered smooth gameplay with 2x transparency multisampling anti-aliasing in single player games, we found that online gameplay suffered from irregular frame rate dips into the low 20’s.