The Cards

Pre-Game Attributes

Here you will see the pre-game attributes for all of the ATI cards. We used Catalyst version 5.8 (non Catalyst Control Center).

Settings for ATI Cards, Catalyst 5.8 non CCC

The settings for the NVIDIA cards used in this optimization guide are shown below. We used Forceware Driver Version 77.77.

Nvidia Settings, Forceware 77.77

*There is an image quality reduction on Nvidia cards when using any setting but the "High Quality". Texture filtering is optimized highly at any setting other than "High Quality" and you may experience texture shimmering at lower settings due to decreased quality. This problem will be fixed in future driver releases.

*Test Notes: This is not a video card comparison article, but an optimization guide for various cards. People with faster or slower systems will have different results than these shown. Fraps was used to record framerates during gameplay. The results combined with our own subjective evaluations were used for the Performance Analysis section of this article. Budget cards were tested at 1024x768. Mainstream cards tested at 1024x768 and 1280x960. The high-end cards were tested at 1024x768 and 1280x960 (and 2xAA was enabled at 1280x960 as well). Please note that higher resolutions were not tested as a display capable of 1600x1200 or higher was not available.

The cards were tested using all available settings to find the optimized results. These settings are located under the video options menu of the main menu. DirectX levels are kept at their native hardware levels. The Overall Quality setting was not used, since we want to be able to have complete control of our settings. All resolutions use 32-bit color with the default Direct3D options and Vertical Synchronization disabled.