GeForce 7950 GX2 Retail Round-up

For gameplay evaluations on a 24" widescreen monitor, please head straight to our widescreen performance section.

Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter:

Publisher: Ubisoft

We used the latest addition to Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon series - Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter and patched the game to version 1.10. This has to be one of the best-looking games on the market at the moment, even despite its lack of support for anti-aliasing on any of today's current hardware. The game makes use of High Dynamic Range lighting and a whole plethora of special effects. Probably the biggest talking point for Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter is its support for AGEIA's PhysX PPU.

The lack of support for anti-aliasing may seem like a backwards step in image quality, as there are many areas of the game that could certainly benefit from a multisample anti-aliasing pattern. The lack of anti-aliasing support is due to the fact that the game uses multiple render targets to achieve some of the advanced graphical effects. This is due to the way that the DirectX 9.0 specification was set out, and even if multiple render targets and anti-aliasing could work in harmony, it'd be incredibly costly because every surface in the multiple render target would need to be sampled.

We did a five minute manual run through from the start of the Strong Point level. This incorporates lots of post processing effects, HDR lighting, explosions, gun fire and water, too in order to give the graphics subsystem a good work out. The game has no support for anti-aliasing, but anisotropic filtering was controlled from inside the game.

There were very few gameplay difference between the reference clocked GeForce 7950 GX2 and the pre-overclocked XFX 570M XXX Edition card. Both cards were playable at 1600x1200 with maximum in game details and 16xAF enabled. There were small differences in frame rate, with the XFX 7950 GX2 XXX Edition delivering a slightly smoother gaming experience. However, the reference clocked GeForce 7950 GX2 performed very similarly - there was only one occasion where the frame rate dropped below 30 fps during our manual run through.

The BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC was playable at similar settings, but we had to lower anisotropic filtering from 16xAF to 8xAF in order to keep the minimum frame rate above 25 frames per second. The average frame rate also dropped down to nearly 35 frames per second with 16xAF applied.

We had to lower the shadow detail on the Sapphire Radeon X1900XTX in order to attain smooth gameplay. With dynamic shadows set to high, the frame rate dropped below 25 frames per second on several occasions - on one occasion it dipped below 20 frames per second. Meanwhile, the average frame rate only just broke through the 30 frames per second barrier.