VGA Charts Update October 2006

More Cards For The Lineup

With a red-hot season of launches, graphics card manufacturers have been keeping us busy. In some cases, there are too many choices for the consumer and there needs to be more information available to make appropriate purchasing decisions. Tom's Hardware Guide has been publishing comprehensive VGA charts since 2002, and in late August, we our updated our VGA Charts again. Our latest Interactive VGA Charts are the most extensive we have put together to date.

With only two major players in the discrete graphics market, there still are lots of cards. From the ATI side we added the Radeon X1300 XT, X1650 Pro, X1900 XT 256 MB and the flagship Radeon X1950XTX. On the other side we added Nvidia's GeForce 7900GS and 7950GT. For multi-graphics platform performance we added the Radeon X1950 XTX in CrossFire as well as the X1650 Pro, and X1300 XT. From Nvidia we added the GeForce 7900 in SLI.

For the charts we kept the resolutions spectrum to that which 95% of gamers really use. While the majority of gamers still play at 1024x768, there has been a continued move to 1280x1024 as LCD panel sales push their native resolution. On the fringe are those who maximize their 1600x1200 CRTs or have a panel that can display it.

The new marketing term XHD for Extreme High Definition has emerged but with less than 5% of the populous using displays less than 2048x1536, we felt it was not yet time to put in two more resolutions. It takes a lot of extra time to run at four more settings per card, and when the time is right, we will make the move to fit them all in.

We will adopt new games for the new year and the next round of test will incorporate the latest feature sets. However, we are at the mercy of the three parties, game developers, the hardware manufactures and Microsoft's Direct X specification. We are confident that DX10 parts will be available soon as we have started getting specs on the new cards - and wow are these things big and consume a lot of power (No teasers for you... for now)..

Test Setup

One note I would like to make is about the difference between the testing for the VGA charts and the single card reviews seen here on Tom's Hardware Guide. The VGA charts use Oblivion to test features such as HDR, with Oblivion used as a torture test with AA and almost all of the settings turned up in the single card tests. The scores will be totally different but will show the same trend: high-end cards will perform better than inferior cards. That should be obvious but we have had some readers send us "why are they different" messages, and we needed to clarify this. For these tests the game is set up at levels a typical gamer might choose.

We tested without anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering as well as with 4x AA and 8x AF settings at all resolutions. To incorporate all of the configurations (CrossFire, SLI, PCIe and AGP), we had to run three platforms. The components and configurations are listed below.

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