At 2048x1536 you're looking at 3.1 megapixels of gaming goodness -- when running through de-dust in Counter-Strike Source on your 21” monitor at 2048x1536 you can practically sit and count every spec of sand on the ground instead of hunting down terrorists or CTs; it's an incredible experience. But as awesome as that sounds, 2048x1536 is no longer the holy grail of gaming…2560x1600 is. 2560x1600 provides two times the resolution of 1080p, coming in at 4.1 megapixels. Running at a res this high on a 30” screen is simply awesome, but as you can imagine, not just any GPU can run at 2560x1600 and still dish out good frame rates.

The chaps over at FiringSquad wanted to see what the latest cards from ATI and NVIDIA were truly capable of at the 3007WFP's native res of 2560x1600:

In Half-Life 2 Lost Coast with HDR, we're calling it a draw in single-card configuration. Both cards are so closely matched at 2560x1600 that you'll hardly see any performance difference whether you're running hardware from ATI or NVIDIA. Once two cards are used however NVIDIA's SLI GeForce 7900 GTX was able to pull a little further from two X1900 XTX cards running in CrossFire mode, while the 7900 GT SLI system outperformed the X1800 CrossFire setup we tested.

The results turned in ATI's favor though once we booted up F.E.A.R. and Call of Duty 2. We're still using the same intensive demo for CoD 2 that we've been using since we first started testing with this game. Our demo comes from the multiplayer map Villers-Bocage, France and it's pretty intensive, with 26 players on the server and lots of smoke, a grenade even goes off at one point. Needless to say it's a pretty worse-case scenario that's designed to stress the cards as much as possible. We're debating about going back and creating a less intensive demo from the single-player campaign, what do you think? In any case in CoD 2, the X1900 and X1800 cards all come in ahead of NVIDIA's 7900s at 2560x1600 although honestly the frame rates of all the single-card configurations are lower than we'd like. In dual-card testing ATI takes the crown too.

Performance in F.E.A.R. is a little closer, in fact two GeForce 7900 GTX cards running in SLI outperform two Radeon X1900 XTX CrossFire cards. The 7900 GTs outran the X1800 XT CrossFire configuration too. When only one card is being tested though the ATI cards manage to come out ahead in F.E.A.R. at 2560x1600.