Half-Life 2

As with Doom 3, Half-Life 2 gets a nice bump up in performance compared to the AIW X1800 XL. The X1900 just edges the 7800 GTX in this benchmark.

ATI All-In-Wonder X1900 PCIe Image Quality, 1280x1024 No AA/AF and 4AA/8AF

Since a lot of environments are outdoors in the game, AA and AF does improve the gaming experience by improving the image quality. Performance is not negatively affected too much as well.

3DMark06

We have not had much time to evaluate the latest from Futuremark to fully understand what these numbers mean. To get the obvious out of the way, the AIW X1900 is much faster than the AIW X1800 XL in this particular benchmark. A lot of the improvement, when you view the detailed report, is in the shader performance which falls in line with what the major improvement was with the R580 series.

Image Quality - Games

It's worth pointing out that , uh, reported an image quality problem with the X1900 and 3DMark06. We were able to reproduce the same problem they witnessed, and like them, we did not see this issue with NVIDIA hardware. This should be easily corrected in a driver update, so we'll need to wait and see on this.

With the exception of 3DMark06, we did not experience any strange issues with image quality in gaming. While the general feel of ATI and NVIDIA hardware seem similar, the ability to High Quality AF with the AIW X1900 does result in some superb graphics. We were able to compensate for the image quality differences between the hardware, the AIW X1900 had the better IQ with a smaller loss of performance.

Image Quality - 2D Desktop

We loaded up a 1600x1200 image (modified for 1680x1050) used in previous video card reviews. I also pulled up several word documents with various sized fonts to judge the text rendering. The documents used white text on a black background, and vice versa. The screen resolution for all tests was 1680x1050 @ 60Hz on a Dell UltraSharp 2005FPW LCD.

Scores are subjective, but having worked with many video cards the last few years, I got a pretty firm grasp on what card renders 2D better than the others. The scores will be out of 10, with 10 being excellent.

	All-in-Wonder X1900	All-in-Wonder X1800 XL	ASUS N7800 GT
Black Text (12Pt)	9	9	9
Black Text (6Pt)	8	8	8
White Text (12Pt)	8	8	8
White Text (6Pt)	7	7	7
Bitmap Quality	8	8	8

All the cards were fairly close, with the only real problem being 6Pt black and white text.

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