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Hardware and Software Used
Now we begin the benchmark portion of this article, but first let me show you our test system plus the software we used.

Mainboard

nVIDIA nForce 680i SLI (eVGA)

Processors

Core 2 Duo X6800 Extreme (Conroe)

Graphics Cards

Radeon X1650 PRO 256MB
Radeon X1650 XT 256MB
Radeon X1950 PRO 256MB
Radeon X1950 XTX 512MB

Memory

2048 MB (2x1024MB) DDR2 CAS4 @ 1142 MHz Dominator Corsair

Power Supply Unit

Enermax Galaxy 1000 Watt

Monitor

Dell 3007WFP - up-to 2560x1600

OS related Software

Windows XP Professional SP2
DirectX 9.0c End User Runtime October update
ATI Catalyst 6.1
NVIDIA nForce 590/680i platform driver 9.53

Software benchmark suite

3DMark06
Ghost Recon: Advanced Warrior
F.E.A.R.
Half-Life 2: Episode One
Splinter Cell 3: Chaos Theory
Prey
Call of Duty 2
Company of Heroes
Serious Sam 2
Battlefield 2

A word about "FPS"

What are we looking for in gaming performance wise? First off, obviously Guru3D tends to think that all games should be played at the best image quality (IQ) possible. There's a dilemma though, IQ often interferes with the performance of a graphics card. We measure this in FPS, the number of frames a graphics card can render per second, the higher it is the more fluently your game will display itself.

A game's frames per second (FPS) is a measured average of a series of tests. That test often is a timedemo, a recorded part of the game which is a 1:1 representation of the actual game and it's gameplay experience. After forcing the same image quality settings; this timedemo is then used for all graphics cards so that the actual measuring is as objective as can be.

• So if a graphics card barely manages less than 30 FPS then the game is not very playable, we want to avoid that at all cost.
• With 30 FPS up-to roughly 40 FPS you'll be very able to play the game with perhaps a tiny stutter at certain graphically intensive parts. Overall a very enjoyable experience. Match the best possible resolution to this result and you'll have the best possible rendering quality versus resolution, hey you want both of them to be as high as possible.
• When a graphics card is doing 60 FPS on average or higher then you can rest assured that the game will likely play extremely smoothly at every point in the game, turn on every possible in-game IQ setting.
• Over 100 FPS? You have either a MONSTER of graphics card or a very old game.

So remember this: You are always aiming for the highest possible FPS, versus the highest resolution, versus the highest image quality. The results is always a combination of these three factors.