Midrange Graphics Card Round Up

Gears Of War

The Unreal 3 engine is capped to approximately 62/63 frames per second by default, and so the most useful statistic in this test is the minimum framerate. Our testing was performed at 1680×1050 with 16x anisotropic filtering. Once again all in-game settings are on their highest setting which means DirectX10 and in game anti-aliasing enabled.

Gears of Wars framerate cap does have an impact on the average framerates and can make higher performing cards seem closer in performance to the lower specification models than is actually the case. It is however a true reflection of how this game actually plays on each card. This means the most interesting statistic of all is the minimum frames per second, especially in such a demanding game engine.  With this in mind it is once again interesting to see that XFX’s 9600 XXX is very close in performance to the 8800 series cards, as is the Zotac 9600 AMP!

ATI based cards fare much worse in this test, even the 3870 which is priced at the same level as the more expensive 9600’s is unable to keep the framerates above twenty-five.