ATI Radeon X1950 XTX versus nVidia GeForce 7950 GX2

ATI Radeon X1950 XTX and nVidia GeForce 7950 GX2 were put in the ring. This comparison was made by the guys from X-bit labs, and came from their desire to truly show which card can produce the highest quality 3D world. The tests included different quality settings for trilinear filtering, anisotropic filtering, full-scene antialiasing, HDR+FSAA, transparent textures antialiasing, FSAA in the newest games (Half Life 2, Oblivion, Titan Quest), performance in the latest First Person Shooters (Battlefield 2, Call of Duty 2, FarCry, FEAR, Ghost Recon, Prey, Quake 4, Serious Sam 2), Third Person Shooters (Hitman: Blood Money, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Tomb Raider : Legend), Simulators (Pacific Fighters, Reunion), Strategy games (Age of Empires, Rise of Nations), and performance in Synthetic Benchmarks (3DMark05, 3DMark06).

It seems the texture filtering quality does affect performance, even of the very advanced graphics cards. High-quality trilinear filtering on Nvidia GeForce hardware is also very performance hungry, and much more speed-demanding, compared to ATI’s high-quality anisotropic filtering.

The test has determined that "the gap between the GeForce 7950 GX2 and the Radeon X1950 XTX is not dramatic in the vast majority of cases provided that both use high-quality texture filtering." A surprise was the fact that high-quality trilinear filtering radically lowered performance in such benchmarks as Serious Sam 2, Tomb Raider: Legend , Titan Quest , 3DMark06 and some other.

The final conclusions:

Nvidia GeForce 7950 GX2 is faster than the Radeon X1950 XTX in the majority of cases;
ATI Radeon X1950 XTX costs $449, whereas the GeForce 7950 GX2 is priced at $599 - $649;
ATI Radeon X1950 XTX produces higher image quality under our settings due to high-quality anisotropic filtering;
Nvidia GeForce 7950 GX2 could produce higher quality antialiasing modes than the Radeon X1950 XTX, but they are hardly useful for modern games;
ATI Radeon X1950 XTX theoretically can enable FSAA with FP16 HDR, which is an advantage, however, it does not have the feature supported flawlessly at the moment and it may not provide sufficient performance;
Nvidia GeForce 7950 GX2 provides slightly higher quality antialiasing of transparent textures;
ATI Radeon X1950 XTX, unlike the GeForce 7950 GX2, works with every mainboard provided that the power supply is capable of feeding the board with 120W of power.