Testing

Usually we try to use an average to high end system for graphics card testing, but this isn't really applicable to the HIS X1050 since it isn't a power house of a card for driving your 3D imagery. What the card allows is the use of Vista's Aero GUI, something that most onboard graphics won't do. So with that in mind we have used a more common/mediocre PC for testing, a Pentium 4 3.2GHz, 1GB Corsair Ram, Windows Vista Home Premium, and AMD Catalyst 7.3 drivers.

Vista Desktop - Tranparency on Left, Transparency off Right

First test was the obvious one; will it do what it says it can? Right from the first installation of Vista (and after the Vista first run system test), Aero's transparency was activated. Of note is that the Vista drivers called the HIS X1050 an X550 which is surprising considering that is what the card is based on. Once the Catalyst 7.3 Drivers were installed the card was recognized as an X1050. Flip3D and all the transparency was available, so with that out of the way we moved on to the more demanding tests of a few games.

Again, the HIS X1050 is not designed to be a powerhouse, so again, the games and in-game settings had to be changed to reflect this.

Call of Duty 2 - Using DirectX9, this World War II shooter can tax cards still, but dropping the resolution and the settings is possible to relieve the strain. We used medium textures and turned off shadows and everything else taxing.

Quake 4 - Quake 4 can be very CPU dependant, and the current AMD OpenGL implementation isn't very optimized for Vista either. However, dropping settings to rock bottom reminded us of Quake 2 in appearance, but what about frame rate?

Quake 3 - An older OpenGL game, and one that is capable of running in software mode, we've been getting high frame rates for years now. In contrast to the rest of the games tested, we set everything to highest for Quake 3.

Prey - I've chosen to also run Prey in the tests as it's quite modern and generally easier on systems than even Doom 3 was. Again, settings to their lowest, textures at medium.

Call of Duty 2

Call of Duty 2 can be played with low settings although when the action gets heavy it does slow down considerably. Graphic enhancements such as anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering are pretty much out of the question.

Quake 4

Quake 4 benefits as much from a decent graphics card as it does a decent CPU, which is why at first glance the numbers seem a little high here. Also remember that we do have nothing but the lowest settings available from the menus.

Quake III Arena

Old school 3D performance seems to be theme here so let's try some old school gaming. Quake III Arena posed little problem with FPS averaging over 160. Unlike the other tests, a 1024x768 resolution was used and settings were turned up to the highest availble via menus.

Prey

I wasn't too keen on Prey overall but it does seem to be more optimized than Doom 3. Once again we get a barely playable experience at lowest levels but anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering are not viable.

Final Words

At first glance the does very poorly in our tests, which I suppose from a gaming point of view is true. However the purpose of the is to provide you with a cheap graphics card capable of displaying the Vista Aero interface which it is more than capable of doing.

Another positive of the is that it is a silent card thanks to it's completely passive heatsink. No extra power is needed either. Both VGA and DVI are catered for as is TV out (S-Video), although no TV Out dongle is supplied.

The bottom line is that this is a cheap way of getting the Vista Aero interface without the need for a more expensive mid to high graphics card that would be useless for most non-gamers. If that's all you need then the will serve you well, and can even provide a quiet card for HTPC duties although you will need to buy an ATI TV Out dongle separately. At time of writing the is retailing around the $46 mark which isn't too bad a price to pay for a nice desktop enviroment to work in but only you as an end user can decide if the eye candy of Vista's Aero is worth the price.

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