Testing Methodology

We tested exclusively in Windows Vista, with the latest updates. We chose these four games for benchmarking :

• Company Of Heroes
• F.E.A.R.
• BioShock
• Crysis

Company of Heroes was originally a DirectX 9 game but was later upgraded with a DirectX 10 render path. In fact, it was the first game to support DirectX 10. It does not have a true in-game test, but uses a graphics-intensive cut scene for the benchmark.

F.E.A.R. is an older DirectX 9 FPS (first-person shooter) game. Although a little dated, it is still a good way to evaluate the performance of graphics cards in DirectX 9.

BioShock is a new first-person shooter game that supports both DirectX 9 and DirectX 10. It is a very graphics-intensive game and will serve well to really stress the graphics card.

Supreme Commander is a new DirectX 9 real-time strategy game. It is a very CPU-intensive game and will serve well as an example of a CPU-limited game.

Crysis is the latest game in our arsenal. It is currently the most strenous test of a graphics card's capability.

All games were tested at 1920 x 1200 at 16x AF and no AA, unless stated otherwise. A minimum of 5 test runs were performed at each setting. The three closest results were taken and averaged to obtain the final frame rate. If the test results varied too much, the entire test was repeated.

Game Settings