Powercolor X1900XT 512mb

F.E.A.R.

F.E.A.R. is a game based on an engine that uses many features of DirectX 9.0c.

It has volumetric lighting, soft shadows, parallax mapping and particle effects, with a slow-motion mode that really taxes today’s top of the line GPU’s. I fully patched version the game with the latest patch. I played three two-minute runs on a taxing part of the game with plenty of action, using slow-motion for the full time whilst firing at enemy soldiers and using grenades that produce a cool “blast” contortion effect when blown up.

The settings used are as follows:

Here are the minimum, maximum and average FPS for F.E.A.R.:

The Powercolor X1900XT kept up admirably with cards that are supposed to be at the very top of their range from both nvidia and ATI. 1920 x 1200 was just about playable with the Powercolor card. If you are really anal about your FPS (in that you like to stare at the numbers) you could take off the AAA and HQAF. But in all honesty whilst F.E.A.R. looks great it isn’t as fast-paced as many FPS so I feel that it played the game at an acceptable level, whilst looking simply stunning.

Call of duty 2

Call of Duty 2 is a fairly recent game that uses a lot of DirectX 9.0c features, including real time shadows, amazing smoke effects and some nice looking HDR effects. This maked the game very taxing at these high resolutions. I played a fully patched up version of the game. Once again I played through the game with a two minute gaming session including explosions, smoke and also lots of snow. This should tax all our cards.

The settings used are as follows:

Here we see the minimum, maximum and average FPS:

This was a strange result for the Powercolor card, with it keeping up with the XTX every step of the way. I am thinking that this is due to a much better driver revision than previously used. Certainly shows how the manufacturers improve and tweak their drivers between releases. At any rate CoD 2 looked amazing and is a great game to play at these kind of settings. The card managed this smoothly and easily and really showed its speed.