Date:
Monday , February 11, 2008
Author:
Kyle Bennett
Editor:
Brent Justice
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Benchmarking the Benchmarks

It is time to put your money where your mouth is, or maybe where your keyboard is. HardOCP sets out to prove that real world video card testing is where it’s at. Beware, we may make you feel dirty every time your run a benchmark from here out!

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System Setup

Given that our recent ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 evaluation caused so much commotion due to the fact that our performance conclusions did not match up with many of the other hardware reviews sites on the Net, we have decided to duplicate the hardware and driver setup that we used in that evaluation. This setup will very much give us a good basis for comparison with the data that will be presented in this article.

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Video Card Comparison Setup

For the 8800 GTX we are using the 169.28 beta driver, and for the 3870 X2 we are using the ATI Catalyst provided driver with the latest Crysis performance fixes for CrossFire.

In our tables and graphs in this evaluation the abbreviation “TRMS” Indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency Multisampling quality setting on GeForce 8 series video cards. CSAA indicates the use of NVIDIA’s CSAA AA mode. “ADSS” indicates the use of Adaptive Supersampling on ATI GPU based video cards.