Related articles

• PC Gamers Have Good Titles To Select From This Holiday Season

  PC gamers have numerous good titles to enjoy this holiday season. The titles that top our list this year are "Call of Duty," "XIII," "Max Payne 2," "Halo For PC," "Rise Of Nations," "Deus Ex: Invisible War," "Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic," and "Madden 2004." "Call of Duty" was previewed by THG game reviewer, Weston Patch, at Quakecon 2003, where we told us that it was a title to keep our eyes on. The end result of this title is stellar, and it is perhaps one of the most interesting World War II games of 2003. While the graphics in this game are top notch, it offers a much broader range of system requirements range than many of the other games that we have seen this year. Still, it should not disappoint gamers and has become a huge hit with gamers who like this game genre. You can read our full review of the game here . "Rise of Nations" is an excellent real time strategy ("RTS") game that delivered a huge wallop at its release and continues to remain a strong favorite. "Rise Of Nations" was selected as one of our Editors' Choice titles this year, and continues to be a game with long play value. You can read more about this game in our review of it here . If you seek a game that offers pixel shaders that can push your new graphics card to the limit, we suggest "Deus Ex: Invisible War." This game has incredible dynamic lighting and bump mapping effects that will give your DX9 graphics card a good workout. "Knights Of The Old Republic" pushes the Star Wars saga to new heights with some great vertex shader effects and pixel shader work on the light saber, which provide this game with a unique look. "Madden 2004" is still the best of the best, as far as sports games go for the PC. The reflections in the visors and the blades of grass that are visible on the playing field showcase the programmable shader power within this excellent sports title. A Screen shot from Halo for PC. While the reviews of "Halo for PC" were quite mixed due to the hefty system requirements of the game, "Halo for the PC" is one of our favorite games this year. The incredible bump mapped effects, as well as the dynamic lighting, make this game look significantly better than its originally released Xbox version. However, we only recommend this game for those with PCs that exceed the system requirements recommendations by a large margin in order for the game to deliver its best performance. Still, if you have a system that can run this game at its recommended highest levels, you will encounter a game that offers multi-player mode (this was not available in the original Xbox release), plus several new weapons and additional levels not found in the original Xbox release. We still stand by our claim that "Halo for PC" is an Editors' Choice title, and is a game that you should own if you have a system that is capable of running it well. You can read our complete review of "Halo for PC"

• Test Setup

  It is amazing to think that a game that once was hard for graphics cards is now only limited by the rest of the system. This is not uncommon for many games now, especially in a multi-GPU setup. At Quakecon 2004, a year and a half ago the world cried out in agony as their graphics cards came to a crawl under this Open GL application. Current cards just snicker at the workload and push out the frame rates. Half-Life 2 was a good overall system game until cards stated chewing through the code. We switched to Half-Life 2: Lost Coast to get content that was more demanding like HDR. This title too has fallen by the wayside for the high-end cards. All three of these games are good for comparing the midrange and below but we need more games to cripple these new cards. Only time will tell what GDC and E3 hold in store for us. System Hardware Processor(s) AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 2.8 GHz, 1.0 GHz Bus, 1 MB L2 cache Platform Asus AN8-SLI Premium NVIDIA nForce4 SLI, BIOS 1003 - BIOS version 1005 ATI Xpress 200 CrossFire Edition - Reference ATI Xpress 200, BIOS version 02.58 RAM Corsair CMX1024-4400Pro 2x 1024 MB @ DDR400 (CL3.0-4-4-8) Hard Drive Western Digital Raptor, WD740GD 74 GB, 10,000 rpm, 8 MB cache, SATA150 Networking On-Board nForce4 Gigabit Ethernet Graphics Cards NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX 512 MB GDDR3 650 MHz Core 800 MHz Memory NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT 512 MB GDDR3 600 MHz Core 800 MHz Memory NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT 256 MB GDDR3 550 MHz Core 1.7 GHz Memory ATI Radeon X1900XTX 512 MB GDDR3 650 MHz Core 1.55 GHz Memory ATI Radeon X1900XT CrossFire Edition 512 MB GDDR3 625 MHz Core 1.45 GHz Memory ATI Radeon X1800GTO 256 MB GDDR3 625 MHz Core 1.50 GHz Memory Power Supply PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool 1,000W System Software & Drivers OS Microsoft Windows XP Professional 5.10.2600, Service Pack 2 DirectX Version 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904) Platform Driver Asus - nForce 6.65 ATI X200 Reference Graphics Driver(s) ATI - Catalyst 6.2 WHQL NVIDIA - Forceware 84. Non-WHQL

• The DDR2 Joker Upgrades GeForce 6600

  The scene begins with NVIDIA personnel walking out onto a dark stage at North America's largest LAN gaming event, Quakecon, in the year 2004. The lights go up and the screen shines with an image of the first PCIe-only video card, the 6600 GT. Accompanying their flagship for the midrange graphics cards is the 6600. It is hard to believe that over a year has passed since the world moved from AGP to PCIe, not to mention how it wasn't long ago that we all felt that 3 vertex shaders and 8 pixel shaders was to die for. The $149-$179 price range was close to the heart of gamers, as they could begin to adopt PCIe for their gaming systems. NVIDIA has taken that same core and performed a bit of cosmetic surgery to produce an even faster version of their beloved 6600. The core upgrade was complimented with an upgrade of its own. While the original 6600 was equipped with GDDR1 on a 128 bit bus, NVIDIA has now paired the core with cheaper, yet faster, DDR2. The new model from XFX is the PV-T43P-UDS7. The lengthy product name describes that it is using NVIDIA's new design with the brand name of GeForce 6600, with DDR2 memory.