Testbed and Methods

We used the following test system for our today’s test session with the new graphics accelerator family from ATI:

• AMD Athlon 64 4000+ CPU (2.40GHz, 1MB L2);
• ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe mainboard (NVIDIA nForce4 SLI);
• OCZ PC-3200 Platinum EL DDR SDRAM (2x1GB, CL2-3-2-5);
• Samsung SpinPoint SP1213C HDD (Serial ATA-150, 8MB buffer);
• Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 sound card;
• Cooler Master Real Power 450 PSU (RS-450-ACLY, 450W nominal power);
• Dell P1130/Dell P1110 monitors (21”, maximum resolution:1800x1440x75Hz);
• Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2, DirectX 9.0c;
• ATI CATALYST 8.173.1-050921a-026915E;
• NVIDIA ForceWare 78.01.

ATI and NVIDIA drivers were configured as follows:

ATI CATALYST:

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

NVIDIA ForceWare 78.01:

• Image Settings: Quality
• Vertical sync: Off
• Trilinear optimization: On
• Anisotropic mip filter optimization: Off
• Anisotropic sample optimization: On
• Gamma correct antialiasing: On (only for GeForce 7)
• Transparency antialiasing: Off (only for GeForce 7)
• Other settings: default

The following games and applications were our benchmarks:

First-Person 3D Shooters

• Battlefield 2
• Chronicles of Riddick
• Doom III
• Far Cry
• F.E.A.R. Multiplayer Beta
• Half-Life 2
• Painkiller: Battle out of Hell
• Pariah
• Project Snowblind
• Unreal Tournament 2004

Third-Person 3D Shooters

• Prince of Persia: Warrior Within
• Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

Simulators

• Colin McRae Rally 2005
• Pacific Fighters
• Lock On: Modern Air Combat

Real-Time Strategies

• Perimeter
• Warhammer 40.000: Dawn of War

Semi-Synthetic Benchmarks

• Aquamark3
• Final Fantasy XI Official Benchmark 3

Synthetic Benchmarks

• Futuremark 3DMark03 build 360
• Futuremark 3DMark05 build 120