X-bit labs

Seven Games and One Week: Games vs. GPUs

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 08/18/2006 | 10:09 AM ]

Summer is the time of vacations, picnics and camping. However, sometimes, you just don’t feel like going anywhere, and this is when the latest computer game may become your best friend. Today X-bit Labs will take a real close look at a number of latest gaming titles and the performance of all contemporary graphics cards in them.

Table of contents:

• Testbed and Methods
  
• Day 1. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
  
• Premium
  
• High-End
  
• Performance-Mainstream
  
• Mainstream/Entry-Level
  
• Day 2. Half-Life 2 – Episode One
  
• Premium
  
• High-End
  
• Performance-Mainstream
  
• Mainstream/Entry-Level
  
• Day 3.  Hitman: Blood Money
  
• Premium
  
• High-End
  
• Performance-Mainstream
  
• Mainstream/Entry-Level
  
• Day 4. Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends
  
• Premium
  
• High-End
  
• Performance-Mainstream
  
• Mainstream/Entry-Level
  
• Day 5. Prey
  
• Premium
  
• High-End
  
• Performance-Mainstream
  
• Mainstream/Entry-Level
  
• Day 6. Titan Quest
  
• Premium
  
• High-End
  
• Performance-Mainstream
  
• Mainstream/Entry-Level
  
• Day 7. Tomb Raider: Legend
  
• Premium
  
• High-End
  
• Performance-Mainstream
  
• Mainstream/Entry-Level
  
• Conclusion
  
• Premium
  
• High-End
  
• Performance-Mainstream
  
• Mainstream/Entry-Level
  

It’s the Christmas holiday season that is traditionally viewed as the most favorable for selling PC games. The publishers and developers try to keep up with their schedule to roll out new products right to this deadline while the potential customers plan their budget accordingly. However, it is usually during the time of lengthy summer vacations that we can wholly devote ourselves to playing games. Thankfully, there is quite a lot of exciting releases these days, too.

As you are shopping for new titles, it pays to know beforehand how powerful your computer should be. The developers specify minimum and recommended system requirements for each game, but you may often be disappointed at the level of performance of your particular computer even it fully complies with the requirements. Sometimes it is the CPU that acts as a bottleneck in your system while running a modern gaming application, yet in a majority of cases it would be your graphics card. And slow performance usually means that you are in for a hardware upgrade.

Right now there is a large multitude of graphics solutions on the market that vary dramatically in performance and in price, which can be as high as $1000. We would all like to have an expensive and fast graphics card, for sure, but not all of us can afford an ATI CrossFire or an Nvidia SLI subsystem.

So, in this review we are going to examine the performance of nineteen graphics cards in seven newest and most popular (according to various game charts) gaming applications. We will analyze the test results that will help you make up your mind regarding a graphics card you may want to have to enjoy some games in the last days of this summer.