Radeon HD 2400 XT performance
There are just two cards in the low-end comparison, AMD's Radeon HD 2400 XT and a Palit GeForce 8500 GT.
Far Cry
Removing AA and AF takes off some of the rendering load from these GPUs running Far Cry. Although the GeForce 8500 GT is ahead at 1024x768 and at 1280x1024, the frame rates of the two cards aren't dissimilar. We'd say that Far Cry was just about playable at the higher resolution.
Quake 4
Knocking down the quality settings to medium and reducing the resolution keeps things much of a muchness. Framerates at 1024x768 are acceptable but tend to dip a little on the low side at 1280x1024.
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
The tables turn in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, with the AMD card forging ahead.
But add in HDR and raise the resolution to a 17in-friendly 1280x1024 and things become sticky again for both cards. Sam Fisher starts to crawl around in slow motion.
AMD's Radeon HD 2400 XT GDDR3, then, appears to be a decent match for NVIDIA's GeForce 8500 GT.
