Performance in Third-Person 3D Shooters

Hitman: Blood Money

The PowerColor X1950 Pro Extreme is successfully competing with the GeForce 7900 GS in 1280x1024 and has no rivals in the higher resolutions, but its minimum frame rate is considerably lower than that of the Nvidia card. So, the GeForce 7900 GS should be considered a better choice for Hitman: Blood Money due to the bigger reserve of performance it provides. If you want to have a high speed in this game on your $199 graphics card, you should turn FSAA off.

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

In this game, it is all about how fast the graphics card can execute pixel shaders. That?s why it is expectable to see the PowerColor X1950 Pro Extreme in the lead. Third-person shooters requiring a lower average frame rate to run smoothly than first-person ones, the Radeon X1950 Pro is fast enough for you to play in the widescreen 1920x1200 resolution with 4x FSAA and 16x anisotropic filtering.

Tomb Raider: Legend

As we wrote in our review of the GeForce 8800 GTX model, the Next Generation Content mode is only applicable on new-generation graphics cards like Nvidia?s G80-based ones. We shouldn?t expect an acceptable performance from mainstream $199 graphics cards, especially with enabled full-screen antialiasing. Note, however, that the Radeon X1950 Pro and its overclocked version from PowerColor still deliver the best results among the tested products.