As always, we've taken advantage of this review to update the tested games. Unreal Tournament 3 and Crysis (using their demos, the Crysis demo having been released on Saturday) are making their first appearances and have, as with other games, been tested under real-life conditions with Fraps (no timedemo). The latest patches were applied just before the test.

Given the time we had to write this review, we focused on DirectX 9 performances under Windows XP. As we've seen, the DirectX 10 mode on actual games isn't optimized and consumes a lot of GPU power for an often disappointing result, and isn't therefore really recommended for mid-range cards.

Resolution-wise, 1600 x 1200 and 1920 x 1400 are our preferences, since (with all details pushed to the maximum) they're the playable resolutions on a GeForce 8800GT. As a reminder, the 1680 x 1050 on 22" monitors is only 8% less demanding than the 1600 x 1200 mode, and is therefore very close. When considering 1920 x 1200, it represents a computing workload of 17% less than 1920 x 1440. This penalizes, however, the 8600 GTS which shows its the limits of its performance. In order to preserve meaningful results, this card will therefore be tested without filters, as its 256 MB memory causes a collapse in performance.

Test Setup

The test plateform