From here on in we used First Person Shooters for purposes of testing. This genre tends to produce the most punishing of games, and should the hardware we’re testing survive the results look rather nice. Our first FPS game to test was the well like Bioshock. This game was released in August of 2007, and though punishing for most systems of the time it is made rather playable today. For testing, we used our two resolutions and set details to maximum. No Antialiasing or Anisotropic Filtering was used in testing. We ran through to opening of the game (the plane crash and first being introduced to rapture) and recorded frames per second using FRAPS.
BioShock
I was actually rather surprised by the results. At 1440×900 I actually broke the 100 FPS average in testing with the Foxconn 9800GTX-512N Extreme. Moving on to the 1680×1050 native resolution of my monitor, I still pulled in just north of 80FPS. Playing further into the game than where we run our benchmarks, I found the average to be in the 75 to 80 FPS range.
As for playability at these frame rates, the game is quite playable. Though I was only able to get through the intro and a couple levels I never had any frame lag. I do hear that there are some later levels that tend to be the most punishing on a system, but I think this card can handle them with aplomb.
Call of Duty 4
From Bioshock, we moved on to another massively popular first person shooter. Call of Duy 4: Modern Warfare was released in November of 2007, and has proceeded to lure players from the venerable Couter Strike and Battlefield franchises. As is evident in the title, the game takes place a one modern battlefield. That battlefield is very detailed, and made quite immersive. As for testing we ramped the settings up to high and tested using our two chosen resolutions.
The results turned out the same as Bioshock. The frame rates were nice and high, and the game looked quite gorgeous. This allowed us to tweak some of the graphics settings further, and add some additional feature like Antialiasing and Anisotropic Filtering without a performance hit.
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