Hardware and Software Used

Test Environment & equipment

Here is where we begin the benchmark portion of this article, but first let me show you our test system plus the software we used.

Mainboard

eVGA X58 Classified
Processor

Core i7 965 @ 3750 MHz (3.6 + Turbo mode).

Graphics Cards

MSI Radeon HD 5870 Lightning edition
Diverse

Memory

6144 MB (3x 2048 MB) DDR3 1866 MHz Corsair @ 1500 MHz

Power Supply Unit

1200 Watt

Monitor

Dell 3007WFP - up to 2560x1600

OS related software

Windows 7 RTM 64-bit
DirectX 9/10 End User Runtime
ATI Catalyst 10.1
NVIDIA GeForce 196.21 WHQL

Software benchmark suite

• Battlefield Bad Company 2
• Colin MC Rae Dirt 2
• Far Cry 2
• Fallout 3
• Call of Duty  Modern Warfare 2
• Mass Effect
• Crysis WARHEAD
• Tom Clancy's HAWX
• Anno 1404
• 3DMark Vantage
• Brothers in Arms: Hells Highway
• Dead Space
• GPU Transcoder

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 time demo, a recorded part of the game which is a 1:1 representation of the actual game and its gameplay experience. After forcing the same image quality settings; this time-demo 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 graphics card or a very old game.