Mainstream Solutions Performance

The following graphics cards, with a recommended price of $149 and higher, belong with this class:

• ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4 - $149
• Nvidia GeForce 8600 GTS - $189 - $249

These graphics cards are not for enthusiasts so we benchmarked their performance without FSAA, limiting ourselves to the maximum level of anisotropic filtering. We also added another test mode, with minimum graphics quality settings.

Call of Juarez

Being in fact one third and one fourth of their top-end mates, the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4 and the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GTS deliver appropriate speeds, which are too low for playing the DirectX 10 version of Call of Juarez on these cards.

Note that the Radeon HD 2600 XT offers two times the speed of the more expensive GeForce 8600 GTS in this test. It may be a lucky accident or an indication of better performance of the AMD card in DirectX 10 applications. We’ll check this out in the other tests.