Our testing methods
All tests were run three times, and their results were averaged, using the following test systems.

 System
ProcessorAMD Athlon XP 2600+
Front-side bus333MHz (2x166MHz)
MotherboardDFI LANParty NFII Ultra
ChipsetNVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400
North bridgenForce2 SPP
South bridgenForce2 MCP
Chipset driverNVIDIA 2.03
Memory size512MB (2 DIMMs)
Memory typeCorsair XMS3000 PC2700 DDR SDRAM
GraphicsRadeon 9800 Pro 128MB
Xtasy 9800 Pro 256MB		GeForce FX 5800 256MB
Graphics driverCATALYST 3.6Detonator FX 45.23
Storage

Maxtor 740X-6L 40GB 7200RPM ATA/133 hard drive

Operating SystemWindows XP Professional
Service Pack 1, DirectX 9.0b

Today we'll be comparing the Xtasy 9800 Pro 256MB's performance with a Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB card from ATI and against the DustBuster, NVIDIA's GeForce FX 5800 Ultra. Despite the fact that we're using NVIDIA's latest (and supposedly cheat-free) 45.23 Detonators, we elected to create our own custom demos for a number of our game benchmarks. In the interest of transparency, we're also making our demos available for download.

In an attempt to stress the Xtasy 9800 Pro's 256MB of memory, I've run through our graphics suite with high-detail image quality settings, and also with a couple of levels of antialiasing and anisotropic filtering. All cards were tested with 4X antialiasing and 8X anisotropic filtering, and the Radeon cards were also tested with antialiasing and anisotropic filtering maxed out to 6X and 16X, respectively.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

The test systems' Windows desktop was set at 1024x768 in 32-bit color at a 75Hz 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.