Mainstream Graphics Cards Performance

This category contains products priced within $149-$299.

• ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro 512MB - $249
• ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4 - $149
• Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB - $299
• Nvidia GeForce 8600 GTS - $189-$249

We didn’t test such graphics cards with FSAA and at 1920x1200 as they wouldn’t have had an acceptable speed at such settings.

BioShock

The mainstream category splits into two subcategories according to the test results. The senior group includes the ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro and Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB. These have a good speed at both 1280x1024 and 1600x1200. The ATI card’s frame rate is barely playable at the latter resolution, though.

The junior group includes graphics cards with a 128-bit memory bus. It doesn’t provide comfortable performance even at 1280x1024. The GeForce 8600 GTS is ahead of the Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4 in this resolution but the two are equals in the gamer’s eyes. You have to lower the game settings, perhaps disable DirectX 10 effects, to have a normal speed on one of these cards.

Call of Juarez DX10 demo

The DirectX 10 version of Call of Juarez makes use of math1ematic-heavy special effects, it is natural to see the ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro in the lead. Alas, this has little practical worth since the frame rate is below playable level. This is true for every representative of the mainstream category.

Oddly enough, the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GTS passed the test having only 256MB of memory as opposed to 320MB installed on the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB, which failed. The problems with the new driver from Nvidia may have something to do with the mechanism of graphics memory virtualization in Windows Vista.