Testbed and Methods

We performed our tests on a testbed that was configured like follows:

• AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 CPU (2x2.60GHz, 2x1MB L2 cache)
• ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe mainboard (ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 chipset)
• 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”, 1920x1200@75Hz max display mode)
• Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Beta 2 x64 (build 5384)

• Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2
• ATI Catalyst beta for Windows Vista Beta 2 (ati_LH_RC0_64)
• ATI Catalyst 6.8

We couldn’t test Nvidia’s graphics cards in the new OS environment because the driver for the 64-bit Windows Vista available at the time of our writing this review at the Nvidia website lacked a control panel and thus didn’t offer us control over the graphics quality settings. That’s why we decided to give up Nvidia’s cards, limiting ourselves to ATI’s solutions only. The Catalyst Control Center in the ATI Catalyst driver for Windows Vista Beta 2 doesn’t differ from the ordinary Control Center, so we could easily choose our traditional settings:

• 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

We selected the highest graphics quality in games. We didn’t modify the games’ configuration files and didn’t use the driver profiles optimized for specific applications. The frame rate was measured by the game’s own tools or, if not available, by the Fraps utility. If the game doesn’t support recording/reproducing demo clips, we benchmarked it manually with Fraps. We also measured minimum frame rates whenever possible.

Besides the standard resolutions of 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 pixels, we also used 1920x1200 in games that supported widescreen modes. Windows Vista being a new-generation operating system and quite demanding about the hardware you run it on, we limited our tests to the Radeon X1900 family as to the highest-performing and functional for today. The recently released Radeon X1950 XTX is not included as it is not supported by the beta version of ATI’s graphics driver for Vista.