Designing Our Next GPU Test Suite

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• NT78stonewobble - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - link

  While it may not be a standard game per say Oblivion with some custom texturepacks are really hard on any graphics card at higher resolutions.
  
  And the do add alot of candy to the game. There are quite a few of these mods that enhance the graphics of older games. To the point of bringing even relatively new graphics cards to their knees.
  
  Eg.: Oblivion with Quarls texturepacks are quite hard on my:
  
  e8500@3.8 ghz, 4 gb ram and gtx 260(216 core) when it is run at 1920x1200 with as much eye candy as possible (4x+ AA with transparency AA)

• moriz - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - link

  fallout 3 and oblivion are not GPU limited at this point, so there's really no point in including them. they are by far and away CPU limited, especially with heavy duty mods thrown in like deadly reflexes.
  
  on my system (E7200 3.2ghz, G33 chipset, hd 5850), oblivion runs at the same fps no matter what graphic setting i use. but as soon as there are more than four actors on screen, the game absolutely CRAWLS as the CPU struggles with calculating physics interactions on those actors. ironically enough, oblivion running with mods would greatly benefit from intel's new 6-core CPU.

• JonnyDough - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link

  Would be good to see benchmarks of Fallout3/Oblivion using gulftown. Anyone know if there are any? My Opteron 185 (Think FX-60, My Opty goes in Socket 939 as well) OC'd about 250mhz seems to handle Oblivion fairly well with my 8800GTS 640mb card and 2ghz of ram. But the settings aren't all the way at the top on everything and I can't run high AA and AF. I'm wondering what a GTS 250 would do for the game, if anything.

• JonnyDough - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link

  Also curious if cards like the GTS 250 would be PCI-E bus limited, as it isn't a 2.0 slot.

• iamezza - Monday, March 15, 2010 - link

  +1 for more games, even if only one resolution is tested.
  
  +1 for the bench like idea, being able to include your current card into the graphs would be awesome.
  
  Also I think there should be room for older titles as well, because if you only ever focus on the latest and greatest games the older games tend to get forgotten by the driver teams. For example I play a racing sim called GTR2 that was released Sep 2006 which is still one of the best racing sims ever made. With modern cards this game should run extremely well, but on nvidia cards the game experiences random lockups and on ATI cards the framerates aren't great when the going gets tough. GTR Evolution is a similar game with a similar game engine released in 2008 which has the same problems. I'm sure there are many other older games out there in similar situations.

• Ryan Smith - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link

  I like the idea of doing older titles, however it's not practical for our general benchmark suite. However if there's sufficient interest, we could periodically (e.g. once or twice a year) do roundups of older games.

• JonnyDough - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - link

  In a way older games are just as if not more important because if they're old and they have good replay value then people are still playing them. The majority of gamers are NOT on the cutting edge of PC gaming. A new game too often requires new and expensive hardware (unless its made by Valve!) and not everyone has a "fast" internet connection either. Nor does everyone want to waste $50-60 on a new game. Leave that for the people buying consoles. A lot of us PC gamers (check general ages of PC gamers) are generally an older group of guys (and gals) who are around thirty years old and spend our money a bit more wisely. We have families, jobs, and not a lot of time to game so we find a good game and stick with it awhile - on the cheap.
  
  Sidenote: I don't use torrents at all fyi, its stealing - although I won't buy a game I haven't seen good footage of or played a demo of so I agree on not blowing $50 on a game I can't return - although part of the reason they started doing this was BECAUSE of pirating.
  
  Anyway my whole point is that tons of us are still just picking up Fallout 3 or Oblivion now that prices are cheap, bugs are fixed, and availability is a plenty. Not to mention we can build a decent little system for under $600 that will play it.

• RjBass - Monday, March 15, 2010 - link

  While the bech idea is a good one, it is far from practicle. There are so many graphics cards on the market that Anandtech simply wouldn't have the time or resources to cover the many different cards out there. I can see it already, while they coveered your 4650, sombody elses 2900 xt was left out, so they start complaining about it.
  
  The best thing to do currently in my opinion is to take a look at the latest benchmarks, then see where that card fits on Tom's graphics card chart, then look at where your card fits on the chart and base your decision off of that. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-graphics-...">http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-graphics-...
  
  In an ideal world, Anandtech would create their own hierarchy chart so that we could get an even better idea of how our older cards compare to the latest reviews and benchmarks on Anandtech. Because the way that Anandtech tests the cards may not be the same as Toms Hardware and thus Tom's hierarchy chart might not be the best answer to your question.

• novaton - Sunday, March 14, 2010 - link

  ComputerGuy2006, And I highly recommend you keep working on the "Bench (beta)". I think it has potential for interesting feature such as: The ability to customize review pages based on the user reading it. So for example right now I have an "4850 512MB". If this site was dynamic enough, it would be possible to have that video card included as part of the benchmarks in the review. This way on every article GPU review release id instantly be able to compare it with my cards (or cards on my wishlist) while reading the review.
  
  I totally agree with you, great idea.

• ProphetMikey - Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - link

  A quick search shows that despite the talk about older games being included, nobody has yet mentioned one particular older game that can still bring a new system to its knees; Neverwinter Nights 2.
  
  I played it a few months ago on my new PC (Core i7@3.8GHz + 4870X2 + 4870 all overclocked) and STILL couldn't get playable framerates in the outdoor scenes at 2560x1600. In fact, performance in the outdoor scenes was so bad I ended up playing the game in 1920x1200 with some of the shadow, lighting and detail settings turned down. Even then I hit some truly horrendous locations that brought the FPS down below 5.
  
  I'd be seriously impressed with any system that allows you to walk around the opening town fair scene with everything maxed out at 2560x1600.