Test Systems

System Setup

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+

MSI K8N Neo2 nForce3 Ultra motherboard
ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe nForce 590 SLI Motherboard

2GB Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C4

ATI Radeon X1950 Pro 256MB PCI Express
PowerColor Radeon X1950 Pro 256MB AGP
PowerColor Radeon X850 XT PE AGP
Catalyst 6.12

GeForce 6800 Ultra
EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GS AGP KO SuperClock
Driver version ForceWare 93.71

250GB Maxtor Hard Drive Maxline III SATA Hard Drive w/16MB Cache

Windows XP Professional SP2

DirectX 9.0c

Benchmarks

Company of Heroes 1.3
Far Cry 1.33 (1.4 patch for ATI cards)
F.E.A.R. 1.08
Quake 4 1.2
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Battlefield 2142 1.10
Call of Duty 2 1.3

Notes

We still receive lots of emails asking us to compare the performance of PCI Express and AGP. If you recall when the PCI Express interface first debuted we saw no performance advantages from the new interface, despite its theoretical bandwidth advantage on paper. At the time we chalked it up to a lack of applications that could really take advantage of the added bandwidth PCI Express provides and left it at that. It has been awhile since we ran any comparative testing though so we decided to revisit the topic again for this article.

Ideally we would have compared the performance of the X1950 Pro on three different platforms: the Radeon X1950 Pro with DDR400 on both PCIe and AGP (via the nForce3 and nForce4 Ultra chipsets), and finally the X1950 Pro with DDR2 on the nForce 590 platform, which is the current high-end platform in use today. Unfortunately though, we didn’t have time to run tests with all three different platforms as well as the other graphics cards we wanted to test, there was only enough time for one additional platform besides the AGP testbed we used for testing. So we decided to go with the very high-end nForce 590 with DDR2-800. This way, those of you with AGP systems who are contemplating between just upgrading your graphics card, or replacing your entire system components can see the difference AMD’s latest gaming platform brings over your existing AGP platform, if any at all. We also used an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ to keep things reasonable. Obviously we could have used a faster CPU for these tests but we know that many of you like to buy the slower X2 and Opteron CPUs and then OC your processor to make up the difference.

We should also note that for the GeForce cards, we changed the default image quality setting from “quality” to “high quality” to reduce shimmering.