Test Systems

System Setup

Intel Core 2 Duo E6700

ASUS P5N32-SLI SE Deluxe

2GB Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C4

Sapphire Radeon X1900 GT
ATI Radeon X1800 GTO
Catalyst 6.8

EVGA e-GeForce 7900 GS KO
XFX GeForce 7900 GS 480M Extreme
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT
NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT
NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT
Driver version ForceWare 91.47

250GB Maxtor Hard Drive Maxline III SATA Hard Drive w/16MB Cache

Windows XP Professional SP2

DirectX 9.0c

Benchmarks

Pacific Fighters 4.04 (with Perfect landscape setting for ATI and NVIDIA)
Half-Life 2 Lost Coast
Far Cry 1.33 (1.4 patch for ATI cards)
F.E.A.R. 1.07
Quake 4 1.2
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Battlefield 2 1.3
Lock On: Modern Air Combat
Call of Duty 2 1.2
Flight Simulator X Demo

Notes

After numerous readers appealed to us to being testing NVIDIA cards with the image quality setting set to “high quality” we finally did just that last week in our Radeon X1950 XTX CrossFire story. We got lots of positive feedback as a result of that change, so we’re continuing to adjust the image quality slider from “quality” to “high quality”. This change turns off many of the optimizations NVIDIA has implemented for anisotropic filtering, and therefore brings with it a slight hit in terms of performance.