Far Cry and F.E.A.R.
Theoreticals only tell you one side of the story. The chips are designed, first and foremost, to play games. So we tested four shader-happy games to see how the new ATI hardware performs.Far Cry
X1300 PRO generally performs a major resolution step or so behind X700 PRO, with X1600 XT overtaking the hardware it replaces by a significant margin of over 30% at the playable resolutions.
It was a bit of a stretch to expect ATI to give users old Radeon 9800 Pro performance at the very low end this time around, maybe, but it'll happen sooner rather than later.
F.E.A.R.
With F.E.A.R possessing a rough 5:1 ALU:TEX ratio overall, and with efficient shading and texturing performance, X1600 XT should do excellently in this test, and X1300 PRO shouldn't be that far behind X700 PRO.
X1600 XT has the same performance with AA and AF enabled as X700 PRO does without, showing how an efficient and plentiful FP setup can work with a modern shader-heavy game. X1300 PRO doesn't quite catch X700 PRO, but it's less than 10% off that target at any resolution you'd care about.
It's therefore a shame X700 PRO and X1300 PRO owners wouldn't really get enjoyment out of F.E.A.R. at anything above 800x600.
