Benchmarks: High Details, 8x MSAA
The highest AA setting that most users will select is 8x MSAA. Since 4x MSAA hasn’t proven to be much of a challenge to our tested cards, let’s see if this will drop some more players from the running:
Wow, 8x MSAA doesn’t even faze the GeForce 9600 GT at the 1680x1050 resolution, which is indeed impressive. Let’s move on to 1920x1200:
Surprisingly, the GeForce 9600 GT remains extremely playable at 1920x1200 with 8xMSAA enabled. The minimum frame rate has dropped a bit, but it’s still over 45 FPS and smooth as butter to play. One more time, we’ll crank the resolution up to 2560x1600 and make these cards work for a living:
It turns out that 8x MSAA and 2560x1600 represent the magic combination. Although it has put up a good fight, the GeForce 9600 GT can no longer render a smooth, playable minimum frame rate. The Radeon HD 4830 is in the same boat, showing a good average frame rate but a low minimum. Only the GeForce GTS 250, Radeon HD 4850, and GeForce GTX 260 demonstrate playable performance at this monster resolution and image-quality setting, while the GeForce GTX 260 is still hitting the vsync barrier, suggesting it has more to give.
