Mid Range GPU Roundup - Summer 2006

The Test

With the recent launch of Intel's Core 2 Duo, affordable CPU power isn't much of an object. While the midrange GPUs we will be testing will more than likely be paired with a midrange CPU, we will be testing with high end hardware. Yes, this is a point of much contention, as has always been the case. The arguments on both sides of the aisle have valid points, and there are places for system level reviews and component level reviews. The major factor is that the reviewer and readers must be very careful to understand what the tests are really testing and what the numbers mean.

For this article, one of the major goals is to determine which midrange cards offers the best quality and performance for the money at stock clock speeds at this point in time. If we test with a well aged 2.8GHz Netburst era Celeron CPU, much of our testing would show every card performing the same until games got very graphics limited. Of course, it would be nice to know how a graphics card would perform in a common midrange PC, but this doesn't always help us get to the bottom of the value of a card.

For instance, if we are faced with 2 midrange graphics cards which cost the same and perform nearly the same on a midrange CPU, does it really matter which one we recommend? In our minds, it absolutely does matter. Value doesn't end with what performance the average person will get from the card when they plug it into a system. What if the user wants to upgrade to a faster CPU before the next GPU upgrade? What about reselling the card when it's time to buy something faster? We feel that it is necessary to test with high end platforms in order to offer the most complete analysis of which graphics solutions are actually the best in their class. As this is our goal, our test system reflects the latest in high end performance.

The games we have chosen to test represent a wide variety of engines and styles. We have included some familiar faces, along with some long over due additions. All told, we are testing 9 games, less than half of which are first person shooters. As the interest in HDR and advanced visual effects continues to rise, the tradeoff required for antialiasing is often overshadowed by the quality available from other options. This is especially true in games like Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Oblivion, and Black & White 2. Thus, we limited testing with AA to 3 games: Battlefield 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, and Quake 4. We chose BF2 because aliasing makes snipers go crazy, HL2:Ep1 because the Source engine does HDR and AA on all hardware (and it does it with great performance), and Quake 4 because we wanted to include AA with an OpenGL title.

In reporting our results, in hopes to increase readability, we will be including a snapshot of one resolution using our standard graphing engine graphs along side a resolution scaling line graph.