Mid Range GPU Roundup - Summer 2006

Black & White 2 Performance

The AnandTech benchmark for Black & White 2 is a FRAPS benchmark. Between the very first tutorial land and the second land there is a pretty well rounded cut scene rendered in-game. This benchmark is indicative of real world performance in Black & White 2. We are able to see many of the commonly rendered objects in action. The most stressful part of the benchmark is a scene where hundreds of soldiers come running over a hill, which really pounds the geometry capabilities of these cards. At launch, ATI cards were severely out matched when it came to B&W2 performance because of this scene, but two patches applied to the game and quite a few Catalyst revisions later give ATI cards a much needed boost in performance over what we first saw.

A desirable average framerate for Black & White 2 is anything over 20 fps. The game does remain playable down to the 17-19 fps range, but we usually start seeing the occasional annoying hiccup during gameplay here. While this isn't always a problem as far as getting things done and playing the game, any jerkiness in frame rate degrades the overall experience.

We did test with all the options on the highest quality settings under the custom menu, with the exception of AA. Antialiasing has quite a high performance hit in this game, and is generally not worth it at high resolutions unless the game is running on a super powerhouse of a graphics card. If you're the kind of person who just must have AA enabled, you'll have to settle for a little bit lower resolution than we tend to like. Black & White 2 is almost not worth playing at low resolutions without AA, depth of field, and bloom enabled. At that point, we tend to get image quality that resembles the original Black & White. While various people believe that the original Black & White was a better game, no one doubts the superiority of B&W2's amazing graphics.

As with BF2, 1600x1200 is a viable target resolution for midrange graphics users, even with high settings enabled. Again, we won't be able to hit this target with AA enabled, but it does look smooth enough that it isn't totally necessary. The X1800 GTO is a minimum on the ATI side for getting good framerates at this resolution, while the 7600 GT does just fine for NVIDIA. This is another benchmark where the 7900 GT edges out the X1900 GT in terms of performance, but the price of the X1900 GT still makes it a more attractive buy (but remember to keep in mind the availability of overclocked 7900 GT options). Users of older midrange cards won't be able to hit this resolution, and the X1600 XT is once again a very poor performer at our target resolution.

Every card in the test is playable at 800x600 with the settings we used. But with cards like the 6600 GT, 6800 GS, X800 GTO and X1600 XT, the game would look much better if some settings were turned down in favor of enabling some antialiasing or a higher resolution. At low res, the 7900 GT looses its advantage over the X1900 GT, but we don't see any signs of CPU limitation in the all powerful X1900 XT so we can appropriately conclude that the NVIDIA card is capable of scaling better in this scenario. This should translate well when we look at overclocking. Going from roughly equivalent performance at 1024x768, the 7900 GT leads the X1900 GT by 25% at our 2.8 MPixel resolution. But as the X1900 GT still maintains playability, we really have to give the X1900 GT the win as far as cost/benefit goes. As will be the case constantly, the X1900 XT leads the pack here and can easily handle turning on AA even at 1920x1440 (though we didn't test this setting here as most other cards are completely useless under such conditions).

For the upper end of our comparison, the X1900 XT leads. It's clear that the stock 7900 GT isn't worth the price, but overclocking should make a difference here. Even when we look at the 7600 GT, which clearly outclasses the X1600 XT, the X1900 GT offers a great performance boost for its price.