Testing Methodology

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

• Supreme Commander
• BioShock
• Crysis
• Unreal Tournament 3

Supreme Commander is a relatively 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. If you want to learn how to use it as a benchmark, take a look at the Supreme Commander Benchmarking Guide.

BioShock is a 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.

Crysis is currently the most strenous test of a graphics card's capability. It is the perfect performance benchmark for desktop sadists. If you want to learn how to use it as a benchmark, take a look at the Crysis Benchmarking Guide.

Unreal Tournament 3 is another first-person shooter game, released around the same time as Crysis, but not quite so hard on the hardware. We tested two different maps - Arsenal and Gateway with different number of bots. The Arsenal map was tested with 10 bots while the Gateway map was tested with 5 bots.

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

Support Tech ARP!

If you like our work, you can help support out work by visiting our sponsors, participate in the Tech ARP Forums, or even donate to our fund. Any help you can render is greatly appreciated!