The evil that lurks in front of my keyboard
We've had only a short period of time with the new GeForce cards and even less with the Radeon X1800 GTO, so we had to impose some serious limitations on our testing and recycle some results from older articles in order to bring you performance info today. You can see the configurations we used for testing below, and you'll note that we used newer drivers from ATI and NVIDIA on these newer cards—a necessity in order to get them to work. We simply didn't have time to retest older cards with these same drivers, though.

Now, I am aware that in reporting these test results, I am committing a grievous wrong. Have a look, for instance, at where this ranks on at the Internet Scale of Mortal Evil. Starting at the top and moving down:

• Hitler
• Clubbing innocent baby seals
• Testing video cards with mismatched drivers
• DRM

Not good company to keep; I know. I'm sure we will manage to test most of these cards against one another with like drivers among brands in a future article. Sadly, we couldn't do it this time around.

When we do conduct a new set of tests, we will probably change some other things about how we tested, as well. Bonehead that I am, I decided for some reason to start testing Quake 4 in its Ultra Quality mode that doesn't use texture compression. This mode doesn't get you much in terms of image quality, but it can make life difficult for video cards with less than 512MB RAM onboard. Awesome.

Also, the Radeon CrossFire platform we used for testing was based on ATI's Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire Edition chipset, a very long name that stands for eight PCI-E lanes per slot. The new CrossFire Xpress 3200 has now arrived onboard the Asus A8R32-MVP motherboard, and using it should boost CrossFire frame rates by a few percentage points. Something to keep in mind.

We also had to restrict our multi-GPU testing of today's new products to the GeForce 7900 GTX. We'll test additional SLI configs and perhaps even connectorless X1800 GTO CrossFire at a later date.

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

Our test systems were configured like so:

Thanks to Crucial for providing us with memory for our testing. 2GB of RAM seems to be the new standard for most folks, and Crucial hooked us up with some of its 1GB DIMMs for testing. Although these particular modules are rated for CAS 3 at 400MHz, they ran perfectly for us at 2.5-3-3-8 with 2.85V.

All of our test systems were powered by OCZ PowerStream 520W power supply units. The PowerStream was one of our Editor's Choice winners in our last PSU round-up.

Unless otherwise specified, the image quality settings for both ATI and NVIDIA graphics cards were left at the control panel defaults.

The test systems' Windows desktops were set at 1280x1024 in 32-bit color at an 85Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

• Quake 4 1.05 Beta with trq4demo1 demo
• Battlefield 2 1.12
• Guild Wars
• FEAR 1.02
• Half-Life 2: Lost Coast with trcoast1 demo
• FutureMark 3DMark06 Build 1.0.2
• FRAPS 2.7.2

The tests and methods we employ are generally publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.