All tests were run with the common screen resolution of 1024 x 768 and 1600 x 1200 (17" & 19" CRT displays). The tests at the 1024 resolution were run in two variations. The first used neither anti-aliasing nor anisotropic filtering. For the second, antialiasing was enabled, set to 4x and 8x for anisotropic filtering. The quality setting was selected from within the driver menus for all benchmarks and vertical synchronization was disabled. Because NVIDIA uses profiles with optimizations for their hardware we set Catalyst AI to standard so it could to do the same for the ATI cards. For both the ATI and NVIDIA based cards, we set antialiasing and anisotropic filtering through the application. If certain settings were not offered directly in the game's menu or were behaving out of sort, we then used the driver.

Overclocking Setup

Each card has its own identity and limits at which it can perform. For NVIDIA-based cards we use the Coolbits registry tweak to unlock the frequency selection menu in the driver. From here you can overclock the 2D and 3D settings for the GPU core and the memory. For ATI, we use a third-party tool called ATI Tool. The tool allows you to change the GPU and memory clock speeds and even has a feature to test the new features in a 3D window. It will report errors and even find the maximum frequencies for you, although this process can take a long time if there is a lot of room for improvement.

The card that was least capable of overclocking was the ATI Radeon X1300 Pro. We could not push the memory on the card at all. The core was only able to see a 3% increase in speed. Both of the other cards were able to achieve better results. The ATI R430 based card could achieve 10% more in both the core and memory frequencies. However, the overclocking shining star was the NVIDIA GeForce 6600 with DDR2 that was able to gain a 7% core increase and an astounding 23% increase in memory clocks.