ATI + X2 The Threat

As we had stated upon the arrival of X2 - The Threat to the closed BETA community, Michael Simms (the CEO of Linux Game Publishing) had stated a NVIDIA GeForce 4 would perform with this Linux version at very low quality, while anything upwards of the GeForce 5900 and 6600 should begin to perform quite remarkably. As can be noted from our results in front of us today, the ATI Radeon X300 and Mobility X300 with the v8.21.7 display drivers were playable using lower resolutions and less-demanding graphical settings, while when we maxed out the graphical details, the lower frame-rates will make the game choppy. However, when the Radeon X800XL was called in for action, its frame-rate was noticeably higher in the results, however, when it came to running at 1280 x 1024 and maximizing the visual effects, its frame-rate soon took a nosedive. In comparison, the NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT 128MB, which is now considered a relative budget offering, it continued to outperform all of the Radeon parts. In fact, the GeForce advantage was definitely noticeable as in some benchmarks the 6600GT was almost 150-200% than the X800XL 256MB. Of course, it is also important to keep in mind that Egosoft's X2 - The Threat is still under development by the engineers at Linux Game Publishing, and the frame-rate performance will likely change marginally by the time the game is emancipated from its BETA stages. We are also hopeful of ATI's upcoming Linux releases for this spring, and you can expect to see the continual monthly release cycle stay for their proprietary drivers.