AGP Platform Analysis, Part 2: New Cards, Single-Core System

Need For Speed CARBON

In Round one the NFS Carbon engine clearly favored the Radeon X1950 PRO architecture and shader power at all resolutions. On the 3400+, we see a continuation of the same story, even at the lowest resolutions, which should be bottlenecked by the CPU; the X1950 PROs have a large lead over the Geforces:

On the older Athlon XP, however, this was not the case at the same 1024x768 resolution. All cards were bottlenecked by the CPU:

As we increase the detail and resolution to 1280x1024 on the newer platform, the X1950 PROs once again find their element:

At the higher resolution, this is an identical story to what happened on the older Athlon XP:

Note how the Geforce frame rates are identical on both platforms at this resolution. The cards are limiting the performance, but I'm curious if it's a driver issue and not the hardware alone.

Finally, we tried the 1600x1200 resolution with 4x AA on the newer Athlon 64 3400+ platform to see if the cards could handle it:

As you can see, the X1950 PROs did an admirable job at these tough settings.