Product Reviews

The range of graphics cards on sale grows ever wider and more confusing. This time, it's ATI's turn to expand its range with the X1900GT, which PowerColor has used for its graphics card of the same name. The X1900GT sits at the bottom of ATI's X1900 range, with the X1900XT and X1900XTX above it. The X1900GT is intended to compete directly with Nvidia's 7900 GT. PowerColor's X1900GT card costs around the same as a GeForce 7900 GT graphics card.

ATI and Nvidia have taken rather different approaches to their designs. The X1900GT has more pixel pipelines - 36 as opposed to the 7900GT's 24 - and a faster core speed of 575MHz compared to the 7900GT's 450MHz. However, its 256MB of GDDR3 RAM runs at 600MHz (1.2GHz effective), while the 7900GT's runs at 650MHz (1.3GHz effective).

Specifications don't tell the whole story; games performance is most important. ATI's drivers still aren't as good as Nvidia's for OpenGL-based games such as Doom 3. So while the X1900GT's performance in our Doom 3 test is good, it lags behind the higher scores we've had from Nvidia cards, including

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our reference Point of View 7800 GT.

We were expecting Direct3D performance to be considerably better, particularly as our 3DMark05 score was way past our reference score and even faster than Leadtek's overclocked 7900 GT Extreme. Unfortunately, we had problems when we ran Call of Duty, as you can see in the benchmark graphs (right). It took us a while to track down the problem to the texture detail setting that we use to test. Changing our setting from Extra to High and re-running the test gave an improved frame rate of 38.4fps; at 1,600x1,200 we got 28.9fps using this texture setting. Changing this setting shouldn't make this much difference, as the X1900GT has enough memory to deal with the 'Extra' textures. On other Nvidia and ATI cards that we've reviewed, changing the texture setting from Extra to High only makes a difference of a couple of frames per second.

The X1900GT's problem with the Extra texture setting is a shame, as the scores using the High setting are better than we've seen with standard 7900 GTs using the same texture settings. We eventually put the problem down to ATI's current driver and hope that an update is available soon to fix it.

Our Splinter Cell results show a similar problem; turning off the high-quality textures improved the frame rate by almost 10 frames per second.

PowerColor's X1900GT has all the usual connectors you'd expect from a modern graphics card, including two DVI outputs and TV-out.

We were hoping for great things from the X1900GT, but had to turn down texture detail settings to get decent performance. If you have £200 to spend on a graphics card, we suggest a GeForce 7900 GT instead.