Testbed and New Test Methods

Assuming that users of high-end graphics solutions expect not only high performance but also high image quality from them, we tried to minimize the influence of texture optimizations in ATI’s and Nvidia’s drivers. We addressed both companies for advice and found out that the following settings provide the highest image quality in ATI’s driver:

• Catalyst A.I.: Standard
• Mipmap Detail Level: High Quality
• High Quality AF: On

Setting the Catalyst A.I. option at Standard enables the adaptive texture filtering settings, but keeps the optimization of shaders in games enabled, too. The Mipmap Detail Level option is set at High Quality by default (the slider is at its rightmost position) and provides the best quality of mip-transitions with higher sharpness of distant textures. Enabling the High Quality AF option, you turn on a high-quality anisotropic filtering algorithm that doesn’t depend on the angle of inclination of a textured surface.

The following settings provide the best image quality on Nvidia GeForce 7 cards:

• Texture Filtering: High Quality
• Trilinear optimization: Off
• Anisotropic mip filter optimization: Off
• Anisotropic sample optimization: Off

So, at our graphics quality settings ATI’s products always ensure a better image quality, but bear a heavier load than Nvidia’s cards. This may look unfair, but the owner of an expensive graphics card will most probably choose the highest graphics quality. Moreover, comparing the speed of games at the old and new settings (see the results later in this review), we learned that our enabling the high-quality anisotropic filtering on ATI cards didn’t have a big effect on their performance.

In addition, we should also remember that when comparing the GeForce 7950 GX2 versus the Radeon X1950 XTX, we are comparing a $599/$649 graphics board against a $449 one.

For measuring performance of graphics cards we used our usual testbeds:

• AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 CPU (2.60GHz, 2 x 1MB L2 cache)
• Abit AN8-32X mainboard (Nvidia 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 hard disk drive (Serial ATA-150, 16MB buffer)
• Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 sound card
• Enermax Liberty 620W power supply (ELT620AWT)
• Samsung SyncMaster 244T monitor (24”, 1920х1200@75Hz max display mode)
• Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2, DirectX 9.0c
• ATI Catalyst 6.8+ (8-282-060802a-035384E)
• Nvidia ForceWare 91.47