In order to test the Sapphire Radeon X1950PRO Ultimate against other RV570 based cards we have already analyzed in our labs, we used a test system with the exact same components under the same test conditions. In particular, we tested using an AMD Socket 939 Athlon 64 X2 4800+ processor along with 2GB of DDR400 memory. Testing was conducted using the resolutions of 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering.

We excluded running any tests without anti-aliasing because we mainly want to give an idea of the potential these video cards have. We believe it is important for readers to know the performance these video cards have when running at settings that provide higher image quality.

For the analysis, we ran benchmarks using Prey, Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, and Serious Sam 2.

As we pointed out in the introduction, the Sapphire Radeon X1950PRO Ultimate has the highest memory operating frequency out of all other RV570 solutions. In most tests the Sapphire X1950PRO Ultimate ended up having performance just a bit less than the HIS IceQ3 Turbo, mostly because of the IceQ3’s higher GPU clock. Currently, the Sapphire solution turns out to be the second fastest video card out of the whole group.