Testbed and Methods

To test the performance of ATI Radeon HD 2000 and Nvidia GeForce 8 graphics card families in DirectX 10 games we assembled the following standard test platforms:

• Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor (3.0GHz, FSB 333MHz x 9);
• DFI LanParty UT mainboard (AMD RD600 for ATI Radeon graphics cards);
• Asus P5N32-E SLI mainboard (Nvidia nForce 680i SLI for Nvidia GeForce graphics cards);
• Corsair TWIN2X2048-8500C5 (2x1GB, 1066MHz, 5-5-5-15, 2T);
• Maxtor MaXLine III 7B250S0 HDD (250GB, Serial ATA-150, 16MB buffer);
• Enermax Galaxy DXX EGX1000EWL 1000W power supply;
• Dell 3007WFP monitor (30", 2560x1600@60Hz max display resolution);
• Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit;
• Nvidia ForceWare 163.69;
• ATI Catalyst 7.9.

Since we believe that the use of texture filtering optimizations is not justified in this case, the AMD and Nvidia graphics card drivers were set up to provide the highest possible quality of tri-linear and anisotropic texture filtering. We have also enabled transparent texture filtering to achieve best image quality by selecting Adaptive antialiasing for AMD Catalyst and Transparency antialiasing (multisampling) for Nvidia ForceWare. As a result, our settings looked as follows:

ATI Catalyst:

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

Nvidia ForceWare:

• Texture filtering - Quality: High quality
• Texture filtering - Trilinear optimization: Off
• Texture filtering – Anisotropic sample optimization: Off
• Vertical sync: Force off
• Antialiasing - Gamma correction: On
• Antialiasing - Transparency: Multisampling
• Other settings: by default

Although the new DirectX 10 API introduced in the latest games should first of all improve the image quality and level of realism, we decided to test all graphics cards in every game only with maximum level of detail setting. We used only official settings available through the game menu. The games configuration files weren’t modified in any way as well as the Windows registry. Performance was measured with the games’ own tools or, if not available, manually with Fraps utility version 2.9.1. We also measured the minimum speed of the cards where possible. We tested 12 graphics cards split in three groups depending on the provided performance level and cost.

High-End:

• ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 1GB
• ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB
• ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro 512MB
• Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX
• Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB
• Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB

Mainstream:

• ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro 512MB
• ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4
• Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB
• Nvidia GeForce 8600 GTS

Entry Level:

• ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro
• ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT
• Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT
• Nvidia GeForce 8500 GT

Since the technical specifications of ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro and Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB are very close to high-end solutions and their price point is more mainstream, they were included in both categories.

The tests were performed in two modes: with enabled 16x anisotropic filtering and in a more resource-hungry mode where MSAA 4x was also activated. The second test mode that we usually refer to as “eye candy” and 1920x1200 resolution were used only for graphics cards from the high-end category, while less powerful accelerators were tested only in 1280x1024/960 and 1600x1200.