Test Setup:

Asus V9999 Gamer Editon – Geforce 6800 256mb
Sapphire Radeon X800 Pro 256mb

AMD Athlon64 FX-53
MSI K8T NEO2-FIR
2x512mb Corsair TwinX DDR400 (XMS3200LL)
Samsung 80GB 7200rpm SATA drive with 8mb cache.
Hitachi DVD Rom Drive
Liteon DVD/CDRW drive
Ultra 500w Xconnect PSU
AOC 19” CRT
Windows XP Sp2
Direct X 9.0c
Catalyst 4.8 WHQL
Forceware 61.72 WHQL
VIA Hyperion 4.53v

Colin McRae Rally 04
Ground Control 2
Unreal Tournament 2004
Thief 3
Farcry
Doom 3

The test system was built from scratch, a format of the hard drive was performed (NTFS) and then Windows XP was installed. Following the completion of the install SP2 was installed. Next the Hyperion drivers were installed and following a reboot the Catalyst/Forceware drivers were installed. Next on the list was the benchmarking software and finally the hard drive was defragmented. For all tests the display drivers were set to best image quality and each test was run 3 times with the middle result from the 3 tests being shown in the review. All in game options were also set to their maximum and where possible the AA/AF settings were chosen in game rather than the driver control panel. Finally the latest patches for each game were applied.

*NOTE: All optimisations were enabled using the Nvidia drivers; this included tri-linear optimisations. With the ATI drivers it is not possible to disable some optimisations and therefore they are enabled. With cards in the lower performing category we feel that disabling optimisations is not something end-users would do as they would be looking for the best performance they can get for the money they pay.