Test notes
We've based this piece almost entirely on results from our GeForce GTX 460 review, so our test setup is the same, with two exceptions. We've added a Radeon HD 5970 and a GeForce GTX 480 to represent the very high end of the market. The 5970 is a run-of-the-mill, stock-clocked card, but the GeForce GTX 480 is a different animal: a "factory-overclocked" Zotac AMP! product priced at a premium. We'll be looking at this AMP! card in more depth in the near future.

The GeForce GTX 260 we used is also a "factory-overclocked" model; Asus gave it 650MHz core, 1400MHz shader, and 2300MT/s memory speeds. Unlike most of today's cards, many GTX 260s used to run above stock speeds to some degree. Our Asus card was one of the highest-clocked variants you could buy, at least before DirectX 11 cards started coming out and most folks lost interest in the previous generation.

Again, all of our benchmarks were scripted except for Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Metro 2033. We tested those two games by recording frame rates using FRAPS while playing through the same 60-second sequence five times for each card. The increased sample size and our efforts to make each run as similar as possible to the others should help offset the lack of precise repeatability.

Our testing methods
As ever, we did our best to deliver clean benchmark numbers. Tests were run at least three times, and we've reported the median result.

Our test systems were configured like so:

Thanks to Intel, Corsair, Gigabyte, and PC Power & Cooling for helping to outfit our test rigs with some of the finest hardware available. AMD, Nvidia, XFX, Asus, Sapphire, Zotac, and Gigabyte supplied the graphics cards for testing, as well.

Unless otherwise specified, image quality settings for the graphics cards were left at the control panel defaults. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests.

We used the following test applications:

• Aliens vs. Predator benchmark
• Battlefield: Bad Company 2
• Borderlands
• DiRT 2
• Just Cause 2
• Metro 2033
• FRAPS 3.2.3

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.