F.E.A.R.





F.E.A.R. is our first game we ran through. As the HD 2900 XT is ATI's fastest vga card at this moment we cranked-up the resolution to highest possible and with 4xAA enabled F.E.A.R. definitely looked sublime on a 20" Dell. At those settings there are noticeable frame rate differences compared to the lower-end 8800 GTS, though overall they remain quite on par. Do notice that minimum and maximum frame rate are higher on NVIDIA's card, and that without those quirks, the gap between each VGA card would certainly be bigger. One of the main flaws in our F.E.A.R. test can be seen in our statistics, there is a certain situation where the frame rate suddenly drops very low and in real life the user will encounter small hiccups. This happened with both VGA cards though the hiccups were noticeable shorter with NVIDIA's new ForceWare driver, something ATI still has to work on I guess. Higher clocked XT's will boost the frame rate that bit extra, nothing special but it helps to smooth out FPS here and there.

Tomb Raider Anniversary





Tomb Raider Anniversary is a bigger, better and newer version of the original Tomb Raider game. By using the Tomb Raider Legend game engine graphics have been improved dramatically over the past generation Tomb Raider games and Lara never was so eye-appealing as we see her here. Though, during our test runs we must agree that current high-end VGA cards don't have any problems keeping the game engine running at high frame rate at any time. With a minimum frame rate off 49FPS we could safely increase the resolution here if it wasn't that 1600x1200 is already the highest possible resolution on this 20" Dell TFT. This particular modified game engine prefers the G80, but both cards deliver very playable FPS.