ATI and Nvidia's Same-Day Mega-Launch Mayhem

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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.

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System Hardware
Processor(s)AMD Athlon 64 FX-572.8 GHz, 1.0 GHz Bus, 1 MB L2 cache
PlatformAsus AN8-SLI PremiumNVIDIA nForce4 SLI, BIOS 1003 - BIOS version 1005ATI Xpress 200 CrossFire Edition - ReferenceATI Xpress 200, BIOS version 02.58
RAMCorsair CMX1024-4400Pro2x 1024 MB @ DDR400 (CL3.0-4-4-8)
Hard DriveWestern Digital Raptor, WD740GD74 GB, 10,000 rpm, 8 MB cache, SATA150
NetworkingOn-Board nForce4 Gigabit Ethernet
Graphics CardsNVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX 512 MB GDDR3 650 MHz Core 800 MHz MemoryNVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT 512 MB GDDR3 600 MHz Core 800 MHz MemoryNVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT 256 MB GDDR3 550 MHz Core 1.7 GHz MemoryATI Radeon X1900XTX 512 MB GDDR3 650 MHz Core 1.55 GHz MemoryATI Radeon X1900XT CrossFire Edition 512 MB GDDR3 625 MHz Core 1.45 GHz MemoryATI Radeon X1800GTO 256 MB GDDR3 625 MHz Core 1.50 GHz Memory
Power SupplyPC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool 1,000W
System Software & Drivers
OSMicrosoft Windows XP Professional 5.10.2600, Service Pack 2
DirectX Version9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
Platform DriverAsus - nForce 6.65ATI X200 Reference
Graphics Driver(s)ATI - Catalyst 6.2 WHQLNVIDIA - Forceware 84. Non-WHQL
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