The contest
The rest of the field is comprised of variations on the cards shown above. GeForce Ti 4400 cards use the same chip as the Ti 4600 cards, except with lower core and memory clock speeds. And we'll test the 128MB Radeon 8500 variants against a Radeon 8500 64MB to see if the extra RAM really helps performance at all.

To see exactly how these cards stack up in terms of vital stats, have a look at the table below. I've sorted the contenders by peak memory bandwidth, since memory tends to be the single biggest performance bottleneck in most 3D graphics.

Hardware specs matter, but they aren't destiny, as you'll see in the benchmarks results below. However, this table helps show us some of the key performance matchups. Among them:

• Radeon 7500 vs. GeForce4 MX 440 — These two cards are close competitors, and it would appear the Radeon 7500 has the upper hand; it's got faster memory, gobs more multitextured fill rate, a higher clock speed, and (at present) a lower price tag.

• GeForce4 Ti 4400 vs. Radeon 8500 — These cards will be priced roughly equal to one another, and they happen to share the same basic specs in terms of clock speed, memory speed, pixel pipelines, and peak fill rates. Here's a chance to see ATI's and NVIDIA's best chips square off on equal footing.

• The various Radeon 8500 flavors vs. each other — We know the 8500LE's sweet price tag matters. Does an extra 25MHz really matter? And how much does an extra 64MB help?

Those aren't the only interesting matchups, but they are worth keeping your eye on as the test results unfold.

Our testing methods
As ever, we did our best to deliver clean benchmark numbers. All tests were run at least twice, and the results were averaged.

The test system was built using:

Processor	Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz
Front-side bus	100MHz (400MHz quad-pumped)
Motherboard	Abit BD7-RAID
Chipset	Intel 845
North bridge	82845 MCH
South bridge	82801BA ICH2
Memory size	512MB (2 DIMMs)
Memory type	Micron PC2100 DDR SDRAM (CAS 2)
Sound	Creative SoundBlaster Live!
Storage	Maxtor DiamondMax Plus D740X 40GB 7200RPM hard drive
OS	Microsoft Windows XP Professional

For comparative purposes, we used the following video cards and drivers:

• ATI Radeon 7500 64MB AGP with 6.13.10.6037 drivers
• ATI Radeon 8500 64MB AGP with 6.13.10.6037 drivers
• ATI Radeon 8500LE 128MB AGP with 6.13.10.6037 drivers
• VisionTek Xtasy 6964 (NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500) with Detonator XP 28.32 drivers
• Abit Siluro GF4 MX 440 64MB AGP with Detonator XP 28.32 drivers
• VisionTek Xtasy GeForce4 Ti 4600 with Detonator XP 28.32 drivers

We also included a "simulated" GeForce3 Ti 200, because we could. We underclocked our GeForce3 Ti 500 card to Ti 200 speeds and ran the tests. The performance of the card at this speed should be identical to a "real" GeForce3 Ti 200. Likewise, we underclocked the GF4 Ti 4600 card to test it at GF4 Ti 4400 speeds. And perhaps most heinously, we overclocked the Radeon 8500LE 128MB card in order to simulate a Radeon 8500 128MB. (The card showed no signs of problems at the 8500's 275MHz clock speed—perfectly stable.) If you can't handle the concept of a simulated graphics card, pretend those results aren't included.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

• 3DMark 2001 SE
• Giants: Citizen Kabuto 1.4
• Quake III Arena 1.30
• Serious Sam 1.05
• Comanche 4 demo benchmark
• SPECviewperf 6.1.2

The test systems' Windows desktop was set at 1024x768 in 32-bit color at an 85Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests.

All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.