Performance

Testing today shows a shift we've made.  Vista is here to stay so it's about time we got on board.  The other benefit of shifting from XP to Vista is that now our testing will reflect true DirectX 10 performance.  Our test bed is the same basic system as we have used for the past number of months except our OS is Windows Vista Home Premium installed in a RAID Stripe array (RAID 0) on two Western Digital SATA II HDDs.  Our comparison card will be the Inno3D 8800 GT iChill Edition.

Testing will be done with real world game play using frame rates recorded by the FRAPS program.  Results are graphed in three minute segments from three game titles, Crysis, Unreal Tournament 3 and STALKER.  Inside each of these games, we have saved spots where we can record game play from a set location making the course of action easier to duplicate between test products.  Screen resolution and other settings will be listed out before each performance graph.  Full screen anti aliasing will be set to 0x in our testing. 

Results

STALKER is a very resource intensive game with a variety of graphics settings within the game.  The most intensive of these is the 'Full Dynamic Lighting'.  This effectively turns on all the eye candy, grass and sun shadows as well as max detail for all areas.  Screen resolution is set to 1920 x 1440.

The Inno3D 9600 GT is coming out of the gates nicely.  While we didn't expect the 8800 GT to be bested, the 9600 GT is showing us that this is no average middleweight performer.

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Pg 1 - Introduction
Pg 2 - The Card
Pg 3 - Hurricane Cooler
Pg 4 - Testing / STALKER
Pg 5 - UT3 / Crysis
Pg 6 - Image Quality / Overclocking / Conclusion