Gaming results
The HIS X1950Pro IceQ 3 performed slightly slower than the Sapphire ULTIMATE Edition in our Far Cry benchmark. It managed to be significantly faster than the reference benchmark in both mid and high resolutions, though. The high resolution test shows us, as ever, that you can still get nearly 100FPS in Far Cry, as long as you're willing to disable AA.
The overclocked HIS - running at 635MHz, 15MHz over the model's supposed shipping clockspeed of 620MHz - tops the other X1950 Pros easily enough. It's not enough to bring it into line with the speeds of NVIDIA's GeForce 7900GS in our Quake 4 benchmark, though.
In the non-HDR portion of our Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory test, you can see that the HIS is barely ahead of the Sapphire ULTIMATE Edition; however, when the resolution is increased to 1600x1200 the HIS pulls away a little farther.
As you can see, the XFX NVIDIA 7900GS card is having difficulty keeping up here; lagging nearly 10FPS behind the HIS IceQ 3.
We see that when HDR is enabled, all of the mid range cards start to struggle. The HIS IceQ 3 is having the best time of it, staying well above a 60FPS average at 1280x1024. The GeForce 7900GS, however, is having difficulties and is more than 10FPS slower in the midrange test.
At 1600x1200 none of the cards manage a particularly good framerate, with the HIS only managing an average of 50FPS, while the slower GeForce 7900GS lags way behind at 42FPS.