Graphics Suite

We ran everything at maximum quality, 1280x1024 with “Highest Quality” texture filtering. Note that this higher resolution and higher texture quality setting prevents you from comparing these numbers to others you may normally be accustomed to.

Half Life 2 Turrent Demo

There’s really no need to explain why Half-Life 2 makes the benchmark list of every gaming website. First person shooters make up the core of the high-performance PC gaming industry. The simple reason is that in a FPS, improvements in frame rates translate into a direct improvement in gaming performance. Half-Life 2 provides a good test of current generation gaming. The Turrent demo is a FiringSquad specific time demo. We set our Half-Life 2 settings to the max, including “reflect all” and ran our numbers at 4x FSAA with 8x anisotropic filtering as the baseline quality setting, and 8xS FSAA with 16x anisotropic filtering as the maximum quality.

3DMark 05

Although an easy target when talking about the flaws of “benchmark monkeys” who run numbers instead of reviewing products, 3DMark 05 is actually a reliable test that’s useful as a predictor of performance across a wider range of DirectX9 applications when used in conjunction with our other benchmarks. Since there has been some confusion, we are running these numbers in high-quality mode from the NVIDIA drivers which will result in slower numbers than would be seen in the standard quality mode used by most.

Final Fantasy XI - Benchmark Vana’diel 3

FF11 will seem like an odd selection to many but this was selected as a pure synthetic test. It’s a good test of accumulation buffer effects and is highly sensitive to small changes in memory and system performance. It is not SLI aware.

SPEC ViewPerf 8.01

A common mistake is to look at SPEC ViewPerf and to assume that it’s a purely synthetic test. In fact, it’s closer to a timedemo of “professional” applications where you have an “infinitely fast CPU” taking care of the normal program overhead. That is, the way SPEC ViewPerf is created is that the members of SPEC sit down in a room and figure out which applications and types of geometry reflect the real-world use of 3D graphics professionals. Then, they capture the RAW OpenGL commands issued to the video card by these professional graphics applications and then use that data to generate the benchmark. There really isn’t a test suite like ViewPerf in the consumer world.