ATI Radeon X1300 Pro Review

Doom 3

Doom 3 is one of the heaviest games available today. As we’ve done on other programs, we ran this game at three resolutions: 1024x768x32, 1280x1024x32 and 1600x1200x32. This game allows several image quality levels and we’ve done our benchmarking on two levels, low and high. We ran demo1 four times and wrote the obtained number of frames per second. The first result we discarded at once, since it is far inferior than the other results. This happens because at the first time we run the demo the game must load all textures to video memory, fact that doesn’t happen from the second time we run the demo on. From the three results left, we consider as our official result the middle result, i.e., we discard the highest and the lowest values. Curiously almost all times the values obtained at the second round on were the same.

A very important detail that we must mention is that Doom 3 has an internal FPS lock: it is only capable of generating 60 frames per second, even if your board is able to produce more frames per second than that. This is done in order to make the game to have the same “playability” sensation independently from the video card installed on the PC. This lock, however, is disabled in the game benchmarking mode.

For further details on how to measure 3D performance with Doom 3, read our tutorial on this subject.

Running this game in its low video quality mode, GeForce 6600 and GeForce 6600 GT were 23.67% and 62.39% faster than Radeon X1300 Pro. The new ATI chip was faster than all other low-end video cards we benchmarked: 4.63% faster than GeForce 6200 128 MB 128-bit (Leadtek), 127.14% faster than GeForce 6200 TC 64 MB 64-bit (XFX), 205.41% faster than GeForce 6200 TC 16 MB 32-bit (Leadtek), 222.86% faster than Radeon X300 128 MB 128-bit (ATI) and Radeon X300 SE HM 128 MB 64-bit (PowerColor) and 402.22% faster than  Volari 8300 128 MB (XGI).

Increasing video quality to high level mode, the same thing happened. GeForce 6600 and GeForce 6600 GT were 24.47% and 70.78% faster than Radeon X1300 Pro. Once again, Radeon X1300 Pro was faster than all other low-end video cards we benchmarked: 4.21% faster than GeForce 6200 128 MB 128-bit (Leadtek), 127.57% faster than GeForce 6200 TC 64 MB 64-bit (XFX), 198.58% faster than GeForce 6200 TC 16 MB 32-bit (Leadtek), 214.18% faster than Radeon X300 128 MB 128-bit (ATI) and Radeon X300 SE HM 128 MB 64-bit (PowerColor) and 453.95% faster than Volari 8300 128 MB (XGI).