Benchmark Results

Ultra High-End

Notwithstanding the use of mega-textures that require a lot of memory to be stored, the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 1GB, with a GPU frequency of 742MHz, can’t beat the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX or Ultra. On the contrary, it is slower than the GeForce 8800 GTX cards by 30-35% across all of the resolutions. The card from ATI delivers acceptable performance in 1280x1024 only. It has virtually no performance reserve for 1600x1200.

The difference between the top-end products from Nvidia is negligible, not really matching the difference in price. In the highest display resolution the gap between the GeForce 8800 GTX and the Ultra amounts to 5-6% only, both cards maintaining an average frame rate of over 70fps. Thus, they are both suitable for playing the game on a 24” LCD monitor for which the resolution of 1920x1200 pixels is the native one.

There are no significant changes when we enable the most popular antialiasing mode, 4x multisampling. The Radeon HD 2900 XT 1GB is 40-43% behind the GeForce 8800 GTX cards.

Both cards from Nvidia have become somewhat slower, yet deliver a comfortable speed in 1920x1200. The AMD card can pit only 16 texture and 16 raster subunits against the opponents’ 32 and 24 such subunits. As a result, it cannot yield 50fps even in 1280x1024.

Recalling the frame limit of 30fps we can say that the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 1GB is no worse than the Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra or GTX for playing this game. However, our additional test with the Fraps tool showed that the minimum of speed could differ dramatically from the average frame rate, so you shouldn’t disregard everything what is above the 30fps limit.