Test Setup:
Thoroughbred @ 11x166 (1.85GHz), 1GB Corsair PC4000, Albatron 5900FX 128mb (56.64), DFI Lanparty NFII Ultra B (nForce 3.13), 2x 20gb IBM 60GXP with a Promise TX2 raid control in raid-0, WindowsXP w/ SP1 and all patches.

Benchmarks:
For the benchmarking suite today it's good to get multiple engines and see how the card fairs.

Aquamark3
Call of Duty
Comanche 4
Farcry
Max Payne 2
Need for Speed: Underground
Serious Sam
Splinter Cell
Unreal Tournament 2003
XIII

A Few Notes:
Everyone wants to play with the eye candy on; I reviewed this card to show you where the sweet spot of graphic love and speed lies at with this particular piece of hardware. What's the point of new technology if you never use it? Therefore, on all the games I pumped them up to their maximum settings, and slapped on anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering for good measure. Fraps was used to monitor all the action.

All of the tests are running with 8xAA, and I won't bother to mention that from here on out.

Aquamark3: DX9.0
This is a synthetic benchmark that tests and stresses the card in multiple ways. Not only does it have fill rate tests, but it also has occlusion culling, shading, dynamic lighting, volumetric fog, and more. I only have the demo version, so I simply let it run through the locked benchmark.

Rather than simply post my Aquamark score, I think it's more important to show how many fps it got in each of its respective benchmarking areas. Watching the test run over the card, one thing is for sure, if graphics keep getting better and better (as this is an example) then two things will occur, firstly we'll need better hardware to play the games, and also they will be much more beautiful and intense to look at.

Assuming that the shown scores are all average fps, you can see that the card needs some work. According to the benchmark, it states that above 20,000 Aquamarks, one should be able to play Aquanox 2 with absolutely no problems with higher detail settings. At 34,867 marks, this card easily does that.

Here you can see the beautiful particle system present in the engine. The visual quality is beautiful as well.

Call of Duty: OpenGL
Call of Duty is an engine based off of the Quake 3 Arena engine, and heavily modified. It's pretty much the only mainstream OpenGL game currently in existence. None the less it still can put some stress on cards with larger textures and generally just more intense graphics. I utilized the run through created by other Staff members Scott and Brook here at Viperlair, and recorded the fps with Fraps.

During some of the scoping sections of the run through, especially while smoke effects were involved, those were the portions in which the fps dropped down to below 30fps in the 1024x768 resolution, and as low as 8fps in 1600x1200. The game is still readily playable, if not for a few parts in which smoke effects filled the screen.

Here is an example of one of the scope sections. Although it may not be clearly visible, there is actually a smoke mist present in the screenshot view.

Commanche 4: DX8.0
This is a little more of a benchmark CPU based benchmark, but a good graphics card helps still. It utilizes open terrain and vast landscapes to take video cards to their knees.

The graph shows it as it should be; the difference in frame rate between 1024x768 and 1600x1200 is extremely minimal. Comanche 4 stresses the CPU much more than the video card.

FarCry: DX9.0
FarCry is a new game that is extremely intense. It features outdoor terrain gameplay, bump mapping, dynamic lighting, and environment physics. I simply picked up the demo online from Ubisoft, and started fooling around in the single player game.

Here are the settings pumped up to their maximum allowed by the card and the game. I started playing through the first level at 1024x768. I didn't create a graph for this one because, firstly it's the demo version, which normally wouldn't matter, but there are known issues with the demo version being much slower than the retail version. Whether that was the problem here or not, with Fraps monitoring the action in game I was only getting around 28fps or below. The game was right beneath the level of really being playable, as the choppiness made it difficult to aim properly or even give the game a proper run-though.

Despite the good looking graphics that this beautiful engine gives, I found that the gaming was plagued by anomalies. Firstly there was an issue with sudden brightness when approaching objects. Simply said, when getting close to something, the object that was in the distance that was becoming closer would suddenly brighten up.

Another problem that was found was with the dithering. Normally objects that are farther away are supposed to look faded, but with nVidias gimped filtering, we have an image that looks something like this.

As you can see, the trees look perfectly clear and not faded at all.

Perhaps when I get my hands on the retail version some of these problems won't be in it, so take all the info up there with a grain of salt, however I don't think that all of them will simply just disappear.

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