Gaming performance
We've already warned you not to expect huge performance differences between these cards, but you will see something, given we have one card running an overclocked X1600 Pro core, differing amounts of RAM, and, of course, the 7600 GS in there.
Looking at the X1600s as a whole against the lone 7600 GS, the X1600s cope better with FSAA, a nod towards ATI's desire for the best image quality. The 7600GS starts to catch up with anti-aliasing turned off, as we pump up the resolution to 1600x1200.
Despite slightly slower RAM, the GECUBE X1600 does just fine. The HIS X1600Pro, while overclocked to XT speeds, is the slowest of the ATI cards, but not by much. The HIS X1600XT iTurbo is the fastest card, by virtue of its overclocked state. However, it's really not much of a performance lead in Far Cry.
Again we have a pretty flat graph, as you might expect. However, NVIDIA's 7600 GS enjoys rendering at high resolutions without FSAA and is almost able to keep up at 1280x1024 with 4xAA set. Again, in camp ATI, the iTurbo is winning, but only marginally, and the HIS X1600Pro hardly lags behind at all. In fact, the performance differences between the X1600s is no more than 2 frames per second.
Now we're into HDR territory, and an engine that gives us the lowest FPS of our tests. The largest difference of average FPS between fastest and slowest X1600 in this test is 1.17fps and that's at 1280x1024 with 4xAA, 8xAF and no HDR. With HDR on or at 1600x1200, the difference is less than 1 FPS.
Once again the X1600s trump the 7600 GS with 4xAA turned on, but then the green card wins with that turned off and HDR on. At 1600x1200, without HDR turned on, it's a pretty level field across all of the cards, with the HIS iTurbo'd card winning only slightly. Turn on HDR lighting and we have an almost completely flat graph. However, note the average FPS here: it's below 20. Given that this is the average and not the minimum, the game is likely to run a quite choppily when played at this resolution with HDR on. In fact, even at the fastest settings in our test, you won't be getting the smoothest of frame rates, but if you tweak the settings a little more,you should get satisfactory gameplay at this resolution.
Thoughts on gaming performance
We've shown here that all of the X1600s on test are just about as capable as each other. The GECUBE's slower RAM proves to be no problem and the HIS X1600Pro copes against the X1600XTs without much trouble. MSI's cards, the same apart from their coolers, perform straight down the middle, along with PowerColor, ASUS and Gigabyte. HIS's X1600XT iTurbo is in front most of the time, but we have to ask if it's enough to justify its purchase?
The cards tend to sit between the 7600 GS and GT price-wise, and we've shown that they do tend to outperform the 7600GS somewhat, especially with IQ turned up, making their price point fitting. We'll get onto pricing in more detail shortly.
