Date:
Monday , November 05, 2007
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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Gears of War PC Performance and IQ

Gears of War is being released on the PC this week and we’ve got an exclusive look at performance and image quality in this game under Windows Vista in DX10. We test the GeForce 8800 GTX, GTS, and GT along with the Radeon HD 2900 XT. We cover DX9 vs. DX10 and best gameplay experience.

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System Test Setup

For evaluation we are using an EVGA NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI motherboard. We are using an Intel Core 2 Duo X6800 2.93 GHz processor and 2GB of Corsair XMS2 Dominator CM2X1024-8888C4D at 4-4-4-12 1T. We are using the latest chipset drivers available and the latest BIOS at time of evaluation.

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Video Card Comparison Setup

For this comparison we are using stock, default clock speeds on all video cards. So keep in mind that factory overclocked video cards may show slightly higher performance than what you see here. This was done to give everyone a fair showing and see how the GPUs will scale. With the 320 MB and 640 MB 8800 GTS having the same clock speeds we can see how RAM capacity affects these games as well. We are using Windows Vista Ultimate x64 throughout.

For NVIDIA GeForce 8 series video cards we are using the latest drivers from NVIDIA which is ForceWare 169.04. Catalyst 7.10 was used on the Radeon HD 2900 XT.

Please be aware we test our video cards a bit differently from what is the norm. We concentrate on examining the real-world gameplay that each video card provides. The Highest Playable section shows the best Image Quality delivered at a playable frame rate.