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.