Falcon Northwest FragBox SLI: Dare to Dream

Introduction to Real-World Gaming Benchmarks

Now we come to the benchmarks that most of you are probably really interested in seeing. After all, you don't buy a system with two 7900 GT/GTX cards just to surf the Internet, run benchmarks, and work in office applications! With any system of this level, most games are going to be CPU limited at lower resolutions. However, there are many people that use 19" LCDs at 1280x1024 resolution, so we'll start the benchmarks at that resolution and move up through 2048x1536.

We'll also include the increasingly common widescreen resolutions of 1440x900, 1680x1050 and 1920x1200. (The lowest widescreen resolution will generally be CPU limited as well, but even that is useful information.) Many games support those resolutions natively, but quite a few others require some hacks to get proper widescreen support. If you're not already familiar with the site, we definitely recommend owners of widescreen displays check out the Widescreen Gaming Forum for solutions on getting most modern games to run properly.

We've tried to reduce the total number of graphs to keep things readable, so the charts will show resolution scaling, and we've separated most of the GTX setups from the GT systems. The charts for the 7900 GT configurations will also show the shuttle system with a single GTX card, as well as the FragBox with GTX SLI. That should help to keep things in perspective. All tests will be run with 4xAA and 8xAF, with the exception of FEAR. We will run FEAR with 0xAA and 8xAF as well as with 4xAA, due to the fact that FEAR is more GPU limited than the other games.

On a separate note, let's talk a bit about gaming benchmarks. We'd love to include some newer benchmarks, and some non-FPS benchmarks would be particularly helpful. The problem is in creating repeatable tests as well as making effective use of our time. Without the ability to record and play back a demo file, benchmarking is more difficult and less consistent. With many games shifting to fully 3D environments, we can only request that more developers add proper benchmarking support. Elder Scrolls: Oblivion is the latest entry in a list of great 3D games that make it difficult for us to use due to the variability in benchmarking as well is the time required. That's why you'll see us devote separate articles to games we feel are important to benchmark, but we may not continue to use those games in all future reviews.

If you're involved with the development of any commercial game and would like our input on benchmarking features, please feel free to send us an email. Considering that companies like Futuremark earn money solely from the creation of benchmarks, it seems like the repeated use of a game for hardware reviews can only serve as a form of nearly-free advertising. We encourage all development studios to make benchmarking features an integrated part of their gaming engines, as an extra week or so of development/testing time could very likely pay back in other ways. This request goes double for strategy and RPG games, where we're still lacking any recent games with adequate benchmarking tools.

With that said, the games we're testing today are all essentially FPS shooters. Popularity also plays a role in the games we select, and so we have a set of six games that use five major 3D engines. There are other games that we've benchmarked in the past (and some of us continue to use these), but at least one of the games tested here will generally have similar performance characteristics to just about any other current game. We're always looking for new titles to include, of course, and hopefully we'll be adding a few new titles in the near future and phasing out some of our older games.