FEAR is
Sierra's latest first person shooter which relies heavily on DirectX 9 features.
With its "Soft Shadows" feature enabled, even the fastest videocards run at a
crawl, FEAR is definitely the new benchmark for future FPS games to
follow.
FEAR is hard on even the fastest videocards in the
market, so the framerates that we're seeing here are not surprising. Nice to
know that turning on Anisotropic filtering does not hamper performance with the
Gigabyte GV-RX18L256V-B much.
Final Conclusions on
Gigabyte's GV-RX18L256V-B
It took ATi a few additional months to
release its long awaited R580 graphics processor. Despite some initial consumer
concerns with its 16 pixel pipeline, the higher clock speed of ATi's new parts
has allowed it to remain pretty competitive.
The Gigabyte GV-RX18L256V-B
videocard PCSTATS has tested in this review is based on the Radeon X1800 XL GPU.
This core contains 321 million transistors and is manufactured on the 0.09
micron process. The ATI X1800 'R580' core is clocked at 500 MHz, and the Ramdac
runs at 1 GHz.
The Gigabyte GV-RX18L256V-B is an intensive graphics
card, so users are recommended to have at least a 450W power supply installed in
the PC. While the videocard utilizes a fairly substantial single slot cooling
system, the GV-RX18L256V-B is actually pretty quiet running.
In terms of performance, ATi still has a bit of work to
do. The Radeon X1800 XL's official competition comes from the nVidia GeForce
7800GT, and in most cases performance between the two is neck and neck. In a few
instances (like Doom 3, Quake 4, FarCry) the Radeon X1800 XL does not live up to
expectations. When it comes to overclocking, the Gigabyte GV-RX18L256V-B was not
exceptionally impressive for its maximum overclocked speeds of 521MHz core and
1080MHz memory.
Ultimately though, ATi has delivered a decent GPU right
in time for the Christmas shopping season. The Gigabyte GV-RX18L256V-B incorporates a bevy of HD
content features, and Gigabyte has assembled a good bundle to compliment the
graphics card too. If the idea of running SLI videocards seems silly to you,
then the Gigabyte GV-RX18L256V-B may be just the videocard you're looking for.
It's quiet, relatively well positioned against the best single videocard from
nVidia, and offers great HD content acceleration capabilities in addition to
being a fine gaming solution in its own right.
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