Originally posted by: thilan29
Oh my...look at the Tomb Raider legends benchmark. FPS goes from 165 to 42(
!!!) for the X1950XTX when enabling next-gen content. That's just ridiculous. I remember playing that game on my previous X1800XL. The graphics weren't even that impressive for it to take that much of a performance hit. The funniest thing though was being a TWIMTBP title, the next-gen content wasn't working properly with NVidia cards when the game first came out...go figure.
I played through Tomb Raider Legend back when I had an X1900XT (about 6 months ago), and I personally found the extra shader effects in 'Next Gen' mode to be amazing, for the most part. (I think I posted a few screenshots here at the time.)
The trick to boost performance was to disable the Shadows option, which didn't even look that good to begin with. My frames literally doubled after that; I was able to run with everything else at max (including 4xAA) at 1680x1050 with almost no drops below 60fps.
I miss that video card, I'm using a 9700 Pro now...
(And speaking of which, I wish the roundup linked in the OP was a little more comprehensive than just "some PCI-E cards released since 2005"...)