Test setup

Graphics card: AMD ATI Radeon X1650 XT
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 at 3.6GHz
Motherboard: abit AW9D-MAX
Chipset: Intel i975
RAM: 2x1GB SuperTalent DDR2 800 (12-4-4-4.0)
Hard Disk: 320GB Western Digital SATA 8MB Cache
Operating System: Windows XP SP2
Other software: .NET Framework 2.0
GPU drivers: Catalyst 8.301

Here is the software we used to benchmark this card (all games/benchmark software updated to their latest versions):

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic
Splinter Cell : Double Agent
Race: The WTCC Game
Prey
Half Life 2 – Lost coast
F.E.A.R

A clean system was created for this test. First the operating system was installed, fully patched, installed .NET Framework 2.0 and then the appropriate drivers for the chipset and the graphics card. For the games we used the appropriate in-game settings for Anti-Aliasing and anisotropic filtering, where they exist – otherwise we forced the settings from the Catalyst Control Centre. All games were benchmarked using FRAPS and in-built timedemo functions, unless otherwise noted. To make sure we got it right, each benchmarking session was run three times, to make sure we get consistent results. Onboard sound was enabled for all tests, to better simulate the kind of performance an ordinary user would experience.

We chose to benchmark in three resolutions: 1024x768, 1280x960 and 1600x1200, simply because the card is destined to run most games at those resolutions anyway, so anything more would be simply Utopian. The Anti-Aliasing/Anisotropic filtering combinations we used in most cases were 0xAA/0xAF and 4xAA/16xAF. V-Sync was turned to Always Off, we enabled the “Enable Triple Buffering” setting for OpenGL and we also enabled High Quality Anisotropic Filtering – all other settings were left in their default state.