Great article. Found one little mistake:
"Kicking a box or rolling an oil down a hill are fun enough to distract players from the game at hand"

Shouldn't that be oil drum.

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This review was kind of dissapointing.

I would have found it much mor useful if they'd included at least some ATI cards other than the top range. A 9600 would have been very much appreciated. Same with an FX5700. That way we could have some idea how the less financially able gamer (read: those of us with finicial obligations outside our computer) will be able to play CS:Source / HL2.

I did however appreciate the inclusion of the GF4 4400. Knowing how last gen products run on current games is important when thinking about purchasing either a new card or the new game in question.

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#2

The GF4 4400 is not last generation hardware. It is two generations old. We now have GF 6xxx and before that was GF FX 5xxx. If anyone is still using a GF4 to play current games, I think they know they will be running at resolutions at 800x600 with no AF or AA. No one needs a benchmark test to prove that. Besides anyone who can't afford a last generation or this generation video card, probably don't have an Athlon 64 FX in their rig. So looking at a GF 4 4400 with this processor will tell you nothing about how your GF4 with probably a 1st generation P4 or Athlon XP will run on this game.

I'm sure when the actual game comes out we will see exactly what we saw with Doom 3 at Anandtech. A huge CPU and GPU roundup with exhaustive tests. So you will get your chance to see the 9600 in action.

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I wish you would include R9800Pro (very good buy right now), since it is not the same as 9800XT. Just look at xbit labs article and you will see a surprisingly big difference. Not all 9800Pros take kindly to OC-ig to 9800XT levels, and many people just don't bother!

And those of you who want to see how other, lower end cards, perform under Source, may want to check it out as well.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/counterstrike-source.html

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This test clearly demonstrates that Nvidia is "not" the performance leader when it comes to gaming. Mearly being on top of the heap in one game "Doom3" doesn't crown you the king. Especially when that game uses a graphis engine (opengl) that is clearly not the engine of choice over the long haul in graphics engines for future game developement...that being said..the new line of 6800 cards from Nvidia are products that they should be proud of.

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#5, I don't think it clearly shows that. For what its worth I have owned both nVidia and ATI (ATI Currently) and I have no problem buying the best card in price/performance ratio. I'd have to say that nVidia seems to be my choice for a new card. Also the gap in the benchmarks doesn't show ATI having that great of a lead. Its damned close.

Also this was rather disappointing. Those resolutions are just ridiculous.

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These numbers are screwed up. The HL2 video stress test IS NOT ACCURATE, nearly every review site has very different results. Don't use this review as your only source of information. On my 6800GT overclocked to ultra and my AMD 64 @ 2310 i'm getting way lower results. Funny thing is the first few times I ran the benchmark my results were in line with Anandtech's review...

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#7..I can't necessarily disagree with you...I own a 6800gt (replaced my 9700pro)..my point was to mearly point out that you can't crown a graphics card line king based soley on its performance in one game. They could do these comparisons all day long and the results will flip flop back and forth depending on the tool you are using to measure performance.

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Have you ever played a game at 20*15? If you have, you know it is awesome. Why would I plop $600 on my Sony 21" if I didn't want to use the higher resolutions? Battlefield looks really good :-) I fully support seeing these resolutions in the future, I was really happy when we finally saw the shift away from 1024*768 on review sites.

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I'm glad to see that they used the 4.8 catalyst drivers. I was wondering whether you guys can run Doom 3 benchies with the 4.8's as well. With my laptop (M6805 R9600), I saw an incredible performance gain (between 15-30%) in resolutions up to 1024x768 going from 4.7 to 4.8. I was wondering if this wasy typical.

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