Testing Setup: Vista Ultimate 23-bit

Testing Methodology

Graphics card testing has become the most hotly debated issue in the hardware enthusiast community recently.  Because of that, testing graphics cards has become a much more complicated process than it once was.  Before you might have been able to rely on the output of a few synthetic, automatic benchmarks to make your video card purchase, that is just no longer the case.  Video cards now cost up to $500 and we want to make sure that we are giving the reader as much information as we can to aid you in your purchasing decision.  We know we can’t run every game or find every bug and error, but we try to do what we can to aid you, our reader, and the community as a whole.

With that in mind, all the benchmarks that you will see in this review are from games that we bought off the shelves just like you.  Of these games, there are two different styles of benchmarks that need to be described.

The first is the “timedemo-style” of benchmark.  Many of you may be familiar with this style from games like Quake III; a “demo” is recorded in the game and a set number of frames are saved in a file for playback.  When playing back the demo, the game engine then renders the frames as quickly as possible, which is why you will often see the “timedemo-style” of benchmarks playing back the game much more quickly than you would ever play the game.  In our benchmarks, the FarCry tests were done in this matter: we recorded four custom demos and then played them back on each card at each different resolution and quality setting.  Why does this matter?  Because in these tests where timedemos are used, the line graphs that show the frame rate at each second, each card may not end at the same time precisely because one card is able to play it back faster than the other — less time passes and thus the FRAPs application gets slightly fewer frame rates to plot.  However, the peaks and valleys and overall performance of each card is still maintained and we can make a judged comparison of the frame rates and performance.

The second type of benchmark you’ll see in this article are manual run throughs of a portion of a game.  This is where we sit at the game with a mouse in one hand, a keyboard under the other, and play the game to get a benchmark score.  This benchmark method makes the graphs and data easy to read, but adds another level of difficulty to the reviewer — making the manual run throughs repeatable and accurate.  I think we’ve accomplished this by choosing a section of each game that provides us with a clear cut path. We take three readings of each card and setting, average the scores, and present those to you.  While this means the benchmarks are not exact to the most minute detail, they are damn close and practicing with this method for many days has made it clear to me that while this method is time consuming, it is definitely a viable option for games without timedemo support.

The second graph is a bar graph that tells you the average framerate, the maximum framerate, and the minimum framerate.  The minimum and average are important numbers here as we want the minimum to be high enough to not affect our gaming experience.  While it will be the decision of each individual gamer what is the lowest they will allow, comparing the Min FPS to the line graph and seeing how often this minimum occurs, should give you a good idea of what your gaming experience will be like with this game, and that video card on that resolution.

Our tests are completely based around the second type of benchmark method mentioned above — the manual run through.

System Setup and Benchmarks

While our typical graphics card benchmarking systems have all moved to Vista 64-bit, we were forced to test the ASUS EN8600GT using Vista 32-bit because of driver issues we faced with the OC Gear LED Display. In fact, the OC Gear driver we used was made for Windows XP only. Thankfully, the driver worked fine on our Vista 32-bit system and we were able to successfully complete all of benchmarks.

While we couldn’t use Vista 64-bit, we did include many of the latest DirectX 10 games for some of our gaming benchmarks. We included games like F.E.A.R., Half Life 2: Episode 2, and Battlefield 2142 that run in a DirectX 9.0c environment, but we also tested this card using new DirectX 10 titles like Company of Heroes, BioShock, Lost Planet: Extreme Condition, and War in Conflict. We hope this compilation will give our readers a broader perspective of this graphic card’s performance capabilities. 

For comparison purposes, we tested the ASUS EN8600GT OC Gear against a Diamond HD2600XT.

Asus EN8600GT OC Gear 256MB Graphics Card Review - Graphics Cards 60

Asus EN8600GT OC Gear 256MB Graphics Card Review - Graphics Cards 61

ASUS EN8600GT OC Gear 256MB Test System Setup 

CPU

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz

Motherboards

ASUS P5B Deluxe LGA775 ATX Motherboard

Memory 

 2GB Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR2-1066

Hard Drive

Seagate Barracuda (Perpendicular Recording Technology) 320GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s

Sound Card

On-board sound

Video Card

ASUS EN8600GT OC Gear 256MB PCI-E
Diamond HD2600XT 256MB PCI-E

Video Drivers

Forceware 163.69 – NVIDIA
Catalyst 7.10 – ATI

Power Supply

CoolerMaster Real Power Pro 650W

DirectX Version

DX10 / DX9c

Operating System 

 Windows Vista Ultimate 32-Bit


  • F.E.A.R. version 1.08
  • Battlefield 2142 version 1.25
  • Company of Heroes version 1.71
  • Lost Planet: Extreme Condition
  • World in Conflict
  • BioShock
  • Half Life 2: Episode 2
  • 3DMark06 version 1.1.0

« PreviousNext »