From what we have found during benchmarking the graphics card for future reviews, only Half-Life 2, Company of Heroes and Command and Conquer: Tiberium Wars have more or less substantial performance increases with the newer drivers. Those improvements does not change our conclusion regarding the product.

Since the vast majority of today’s games use realistic lighting, detailed textures and high-quality special effects, we do not know why anyone would decrease texture filtering quality to add rather ugly artifacts.

Given that in the last two years we tested a number of performance-mainstream graphics cards with 256-bit memory bus and decent performance with FSAA 4x, we have no idea why we have to step back to no-FSAA mode ahead of the ATI RV670 and Nvidia G8M launch, both of which are projected to feature 256-bit memory bus.

Please keep in mind that enabling FSAA does not affect relative performance of different products.

And again, ATI 2600 and nvidia 8600 are 128 bit bus cards

You said right performance mainstream.
Where those cards cost(ed) 200$ and more.
The cards you are reviewing cost 100$ or less.

You know most games have an Options Menu where you can change game detail settings to low, medium, high, very high.
So you can make sure you can play games with the right FPS amount for the type of card you have.

Low end card = Low detail settings.
Medium card = Medium detail settings.
High end card = High detail settings.

Actually AMD's midrange is on par with nvdia's midrage....

just because the review noobs want to turn on AA and AF to the max on these cards,the performance of X2600Xt looks bad

+ using new nvidia and old ATI drivers is really weird