ati x1600 128mb and 64bit bus bandwith

Well i have this card and i read alot of places that it is significantly worse than

256GDDR3 128bit ati x1600

so i wanted to ask you others who have this card how do you run new games such as FEAR DOOM STALKER...

i only tried Ghost recon advanced fighter demo which requires following as minimum
Minimum requirements

* Processor: 2 GHz
* Memory: 1024 MB
* DirectX 9.0c
* NVIDIA GeForce 6/7 or ATI Radeon 9600-9800/X 64 mb dedicated

I runned it with

15,4 screen
C2D 1.66
512mb ram
and the ati....

EVerything set on max except texture medium (you will need at least Nvidia 7800/ati x1800 before the game allows you to set it on high)

RESULTS

I had to wait about 10 minutes because basically 128 of ram was taken by GPU while background proccesses taked another 128 of ram

GRAW had only 256 ram availible but wait ... game lags in the first briefing for about a minure and after that it works smoothly and very playable would guess around 30FPS!!!!
WARNing you may be able to play it on same specs but i deffinitely wont reccomend using 512 mb of ram because it takes exactly 5 more minutes to shut the game down WITH alt+ctrl+delete.

 

The card performs similarly to an x1450 or a x2300, IIRC. It's definitely not a gaming or performance card, and shouldn't even be called an x1600 IMO. It will run current games on mid settings okay, but next-gen and upcoming games it will struggle with at mid to low settings.

 

I have the "256GDDR3 128bit ati x1600" in my rig and I have played F.E.A.R and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. all the way through. While it's not the newest or most powerful graphics card available today, I can honestly say that I ran the aforementioned games with video settings pretty high and framerates were very respectable.

With todays games, a 256MB vid card is almost mandatory and GDDR3 is easier to overclock (if you opt to try that).

 

The card you have is completely different than the card the OP inquired about, as it has double the memory bandwith.

 

hmmm, I thought I made that clear. I didn't want to bash the OP's card but, truth be told, it's probably not up to playing new generation games. Sorry for any confusion.

 

A nice note is that even the 64-bit version is quite overclock friendly. Ive managed to get my 3dmark to go from 2800 to 3500 with 540/500 clocks. Makes a big difference. Sure you wont be able to play games on max settings at native res, but ull be able to play most at native res with med/high settings. eg.

FEAR: res 800x600 (dont notice it as much as you think) w/o AA, AF or volumetric shadows. The game still looks great and runs at a very smooth 30/40. Can disable the shadows and have it run at 1280x800 but you lose all the atmostphere!

Oblivion: After the necessary tweakin, I can get ~30fps at native res at med textures and with shadows/HDR disabled, but with bloom. Game still looks great though.

Company of Heroes: runs at 1280x800 with med/high settings at 25/45 (changes a lot depending on whats bein rendered)

Farcry: absolutely maxed (cept 2x AA) very smooth 30/40fps.

With a little wise tweaking (and i definetly recommend www.tweakguides.com for that) and knowing what the weak areas of ur card are you can get some quite impressive performance. And for the big news, tonight when i get back from work I can tell ya how Bioshock pefroms. The suspense is killing...

Admittedly, the 64-bit version aint no full fledged version of the x1600, but it by no means deserves to be compared to the little brother that is the x1400.
And again, with the clock speeds iv used, and a little undervolting of the cpu, at temperatures 5degrees lower than factory i get an extra 25% performance!
Hope this helped a little.

btw, whats the standard x1600 3dmark score? Roundabout 4250 right?

 

The 3dmark scores are no where near that high, unless you're talking about 3dmark05? In 3dmark06 the x1600 gets up to 2000, I think in 05 it gets up to 4700 (depending on the processor).

 

i got only 2097 points with my specs in 3dmark 05

 

Wolfraider, you need more ram. 512 MB ram is too little, get at least 1GB. That would definitly make gameplay smoother.

 

yep i already made a thread about it (didnt know what ram fits into my pc)
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=158699&page=2

 

Bah. The 128-bit memory bus really makes a difference. My Geforce Go 6600 can get slightly over 3200 in 3DMark05. And yeah, mine's 128-bit. My friend's Asus S96J with the 128-bit X1600 gets 4300-4400 in 3DMark05. So I'm seriously considering the halved memory bus a big factor. Then again, woflraider's system RAM might be another factor. But we're talking about 3DMark right? I always thought of it as heavily GPU dependent. Just for additional info, my friend's S96J has 2 Gb of 667 DDR2 RAM.

 

both are. he's got too little memory an gpu with a too smaLL BUS.

 

well when i get more ram i will perform tests in both 3dmark 05 AND 06 to see if there is any difference and will post them here of course

 

I don't if 3dmark will be affected, but gameplay definitly will.

 

^^^^^
well that's the most important thing.

 

3DMark hardly reflects real-world performance. My friend's 8400M GS gets nearly twice as much in 3DMark06 (in 06 only. ) but my 6600 Go absolutely destroys his 8400M GS in terms of real-world performance. Meh. I saw some guys posting in the other thread saying that the 8400M GS is "significantly better" than the 6600 Go. Wait till I get my hands on the Bioshock demo.

 

that is good to hear who cares if it scores low benchmarks as long as it can play new games good it is more than ok.

 

Played Bioshock on the previously said 64-bit x1600 and im quite impressed. At 1280x720 and at medium settings it runs quite reasonably, except for areas heavy wth particles (in other words the entire frikkin game!). Sadly i cant find the option in the .ini to turn off particles, but im pretty sure that would give the necessary boost to make it very playable. At the moment its ~17, but in particle poor areas its bout ~30.

 

i overclocked my gpu by 80 mhz from
core speed 398,25
memory speed 374,30

and increased my 3dmark points by 900 so i got 2908 yay.

than i test it far cry and only got +1 or 2 FPS so almost uselles
but as fabberati said i got myself 512 mb ram for free and i pluged it in and got 10-12 FPs which is really delightfull considering i couldnt run it before without major lags.

Conclusion
512 mb ram sucks like hell for games 1gb was enough to really boost my gaming performance and as ever monk said this card is not a x1400 since x1400 will very doubtly run far cry on max
overclocking is not much of use maybe in some specific computers it is.

 

wolfraider, overclocking is of use, but not if you raise the clock by 80mhz or so. Most people are freaked out by the idea of radically overclocking, but with my computer i went from 430/370 to 550/500 and after a bit of processor undervolting i found the temperature to actually be less than before when gaming. And performance takes a huge jump (bout a 30% improvement) The only thing that will hurt your computer is heat, but if you keep an eye on that theres nothing to be afraid of. Release the beast hidden in that x1600 .

Im quite happy as with my clocks my card is basically just as strong as a normal x1600.