Fall 2003 Video Card Roundup - Part 2: High End Shootout

An even more updated Test Suite

In Part 1 we introduced our new test suite; this edition brings some refinements and four additions, but (believe it or not) it is still not complete. It isn't our goal to simply throw numbers into space and see what happens, so we are really focusing on honing our benchmarks to make them as robust and accurate as possible. As such, we have had to forgo a few additions that we really wanted to make, and we've had to drop one of the titles we had included in Part 1. This is how the new suite looks as things stand for this article:

Aquamark3

C&C Generals: Zero Hour

EVE: The Second Genesis

F1 Challenge '99-'02

Final Fantasy XI

GunMetal

Halo

Homeworld 2

Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy

Neverwinter Nights: Shadow of Undrendtide

SimCity 4

Splinter Cell

Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness

Tron 2.0

Unreal Tournament 2003

Warcraft III: Frozen Throne

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory

X2: The Threat

Our previous Flight Simulator benchmark just didn't push the game far enough, and we are hard at work trying to find a benchmark that better reflects gameplay and is completely repeatable. We have really appreciated your feedback, and we ask that you continue to suggest games for possible inclusion in the suite. Just so you'll know what we already have slated to make it in "When their done" (to borrow from 3DRealms), these games will be added either as we finalize a benchmarking procedure for them or as they are released:

Doom3

MS Flight Simulator 2004

Battlefield 1942: Secret Weapons of WWII

Halflife 2

FIFA Soccer 2004

We wanted to include Battlefield in this review unfortunately we were still unable to come up with a repeatable test to include. We have looked at other tests on the net and would rather use something a bit more scientific if possible but it's going to take some more time. If anyone from the Battlefield community has any suggestions on how to reliably benchmark the game, we're all ears.

As we received some criticism that the CPU we used in Part 1 wasn't fast enough, we upgraded our testbed for Part 2; the test system we used is as follows:

AMD Athlon64 FX51

1GB DDR400 (2x512MB)

nForce3 motherboard

With all of that out of the way, it's time to get to the benchmarks…