Testbed and Methods

We tested contemporary graphics cards in a number of latest gaming titles on the following testbed:

• AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 CPU (2x2.60GHz, 2x1MB L2)
• ABIT AN8 32X mainboard (nForce4 SLI X16) for Nvidia GeForce cards
• ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe mainboard (ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200) for ATI Radeon cards
• OCZ PC-3200 Platinum EL DDR SDRAM (2x1GB, CL2-3-2-5)
• Maxtor MaXLine III 7B250S0 (Serial ATA-150, 16MB buffer)
• Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 sound card
• Enermax Liberty 620W power supply (ELT620AWT)
• Samsung SyncMaster 244T monitor (24”, 1920x1200@75Hz max display mode)
• Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2, DirectX 9.0c
• ATI Catalyst 7.1
• Nvidia ForceWare 97.92 for GeForce 8
• Nvidia ForceWare 93.71 for GeForce 7

The graphics card drivers were set up in such a way as to provide the highest possible quality of texture filtering.

ATI Catalyst:

• Catalyst A.I.: Standard
• Mipmap Detail Level: High Quality
• Wait for vertical refresh: Always off
• Adaptive antialiasing: Off
• Temporal antialiasing: Off
• High Quality AF: On
• Other settings: by default

Nvidia ForceWare:

• Texture Filtering: High quality
• Vertical sync: Off
• Trilinear optimization: Off
• Anisotropic optimization: Off
• Anisotropic sample optimization: Off
• Gamma correct antialiasing: On
• Transparency antialiasing: Off
• Other settings: by default

We selected the highest possible graphics quality level in each game. We didn’t modify the games’ configuration files. Performance was measured with the games’ own tools or, if not available, manually with Fraps utility. We also measured the minimum speed of the cards where possible.

We tested the High-End and Performance-Mainstream solutions only in “eye candy” mode, with enabled anisotropic filtering 16x and full-screen anti-aliasing (FSAA) 4x.

When the user is buying an expensive solution he initially expects to receive comfortable gaming experience with all the image quality enhancing features activated. We ran the tests with disabled FSAA if the games did not support FSAA due to the specifics of their engine or used HDR (FP16).

We enabled FSAA and anisotropic filtering from the game. If this was not possible, we forced them using the appropriate driver settings of ATI Catalyst and Nvidia ForceWare.

Since contemporary games eat up a lot of the video subsystem resources, we tested mainstream graphics cards only in pure performance mode, i.e. with only anisotropic filtering (AF) enabled.

We ran our tests in resolutions standard for our testing methodology: 1280x1024, 1600x1200 and 1920x1200. This time we decided not to run any tests in 2500x1600 resolution, because there are very few monitors that support this resolution and very few gamers have them at their disposal. Moreover, this resolution makes sense only for GeForce 8800 GTX type of graphics accelerators and more powerful multi-GPU systems. Further on, when new-generation AMD/ATI solutions come out, we will most likely devote a special article to this matter.

The following graphics cards participated in our today’s test session:

Premium and High-End Class

• ATI Radeon X1950 XTX
• Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX
• Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB
• Nvidia GeForce 7950 GX2

Performance-Mainstream Class

• ATI Radeon X1900 XT
• ATI Radeon X1950 Pro
• Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB
• Nvidia GeForce 7950 GT
• Nvidia GeForce 7900 GS

Mainstream Class

• AMD Radeon X1650 XT
• Nvidia GeForce 7600 GT

We selected the following seven contemporary games to evaluate the performance of our 11 testing participants. Some of these games may already be familiar to you:

• Battlefield 2142
• Call of Juarez
• Company of Heroes
• Gothic 3
• Neverwinter Nights 2
• Splinter Cell: Double Agent
• Supreme Commander