The Cards

Pre-Game Attributes

Here you will see the pre-game attributes for all of the ATI cards. We used Catalyst version 5.11 (without Catalyst Control Center).

X850XT pre-game attributes.

X700Pro, A very solid performer.

X600XT, pretty good card.

9500Pro, unlocked and showing its 9700 properties!

The settings for the NVIDIA cards used in this optimization guide are shown below. We used Forceware Driver Version 81.82.

The 6800GT before we get in the game.

Our old 5700 Ultra reference board.

*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. Cards were tested at 800x600, 1024x768, and 1280x1024. With the higher end cards we incorporated 4xAA. After the results were tabulated, we picked a target resolution and quality for each card. The target resolution and quality setting had to be an amount that would give us the best quality/performance combination and still allow for tweaking. We then tested the advanced settings for each card utilizing the target resolution and quality to see what impact it would have. Please note that resolutions higher than 1280x1024 were not tested. DirectX levels are kept at their native hardware levels. All resolutions use 32-bit color with OpenGL and Vertical Synchronization disabled.