Q3 2006 Midrange GPU Shootout
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Test Setup
Test Setup
All the graphics cards were benchmarked on a common test bed anchored by a MSI K8N Diamond Plus motherboard. An Athlon FX-55 (2.6GHz) processor and 1GB of low latency Kingston DDR400 RAM (dual channel mode) were installed, along with a Seagate 7200.7 SATA hard drive. The operating system of choice (rather the only realistic one for gaming) is Microsoft's dominant Windows XP Professional, which we had to patch with the latest Service Pack 2 and other updates. The latest DirectX 9.0c update was also installed to ensure that all the games ran without any issues.
The NVIDIA representatives were all tested with the beta ForceWare 91.29 drivers while Catalyst 6.5 was used for the ATI contingent. Altogether, we included six graphics cards from the present generation, three from each chipmaker. To show how much we have progressed (or not) from the previous generation of graphics cards, we have included the midrange favorite of many enthusiasts, NVIDIA's GeForce 6600 GT as the baseline which we would compare our cards against, giving us up to seven sets of benchmarks.
For this comparison, we decided to streamline our usual benchmarks so as to minimize any known bias for or against any chipset manufacturer. However, we did have to consider the present gaming scene such that the games we included would be the more popular game titles or game engines that would stress the 3D capabilities of these midrange chipsets. Below is the list of benchmarks tested:
- Futuremark 3DMark05 Pro (version 120)
- Futuremark 3DMark06 Pro (version 102)
- Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell 3: Chaos Theory (version 1.3)
- F.E.A.R
- Quake 4
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