VGA Charts V: PCI Express Graphics Cards

Test Configuration

We ran our tests in three different resolutions and settings :

• 1024x768 at 32-bit color depth without FSAA and anisotropic filtering
• 1024x768 at 32-bit color depth with 4x FSAA (when possible) and 8x AF (when possible), except in 3DMark 2005
• 1600x1200 at 32-bit color depth with 4xFSAA and 8x AF.

Our testing system consisted of an ASUS A8N-SLI based on NVIDIA’s nForce4-SLI chipset, an AMD Athlon64 4000+ and 1 GB of RAM.

Note : The test system used for this comparison is markedly faster than the one we used in the previous version of the VGA Charts. Faster CPU, memory interface, chipset and newer versions of the cards’ graphics drivers all result in much higher scores. As a result, any performance differences you see here compared to the previous (AGP) VGA Charts cannot necessarily be attributed to the PCI Express interface alone !