BFG Technologies Asylum GeForce FX 5900 Ultra - 256MB
NVIDIA Detonator XP Driver Version 44.03
VIA Hyperion 4in1 v4.48 drivers
32-Bit Color / Onboard Sound / Vsync Disabled
Windows XP Professional w/ Service Pack 1 / DirectX 9b
NOTE: A fresh install of Windows was not used. With real world testing being
arguably more important than synthetic benchmarking I felt it unrealistic to use
a fresh install. I don't reinstall Windows before playing a game, do you? My
system was, however, thoroughly defragged with a third-party defragging utility
before and after all benchmark utilities, games, etc were installed.
Notes
Texture Sharpening was unchecked in the Detonator Drivers in all cases.
The video card was overclocked to 500MHz Core Clock Frequency
and 926MHz Memory Clock Frequency for the entire review.
BIOS Settings
183MHz Front Side Bus
Memory Timing 4-2-2
CAS Latency 2
VCore 1.75
VMem 2.9
WCPUID screenshot from my system
BENCHMARK SOFTWARE
My opinion is that synthetic benchmarks in general are boring
and tired. Sure, they are relevant in many ways, but I decided to focus strictly
on games for this review based on the majority of feedback I received from the
forums and e-mail. I tried to cover most of the major gaming genres (FPS, RPG, RTS, Flight Sims and Racing Sims/Sports). The latest version of FRAPS (2.0) was
used to determine the minimum, average and maximum frames per second (FPS) as
well as used for taking in-game screen shots. Also, 32-bit color depth was used
for all tests and the maximum graphical settings were always used for every
game.
This section is probably the most important one in
this review. I say this because the conclusions you come to about this product
will be heavily based on the results of the game benchmarks that
follow. So, below I've outlined five important things to keep in mind about the
overall benchmarking process. Please note that any specific issues/thoughts will
be brought to your attention within each game's benchmark section.
Many of the benchmarks were performed on DEMO
(not retail) versions of games. In a perfect world I would exclusively use
only retail versions for obvious reasons (latest build of game engines,
latest patches, etc). I hope you'll agree that something (demo versions in
some cases) is better than nothing. However, you'll be able to play these demos on your system and compare performance with mine.
With the exception of Unreal Tournament 2003,
Dungeon Siege and (to a lesser extent) Warcraft III and Morrowind; there are
no set standards to choose from for benchmarking a given game. While
introducing more room for fluctuation and variance than a traditional
synthetic benchmark; my opinion is that "real world" game benchmarking can
still be very valuable and reliable if the proper attention to detail and
consistency is made. I've done my very best to ensure that the approaches I
used were as accurate and consistent as possible.
Because of the wide variety of games involved,
there are likewise a wide variety of differences between them regarding
things like supported resolutions, various graphics settings, etc. Some games may even have only one resolution that I
test at simply because lower resolutions don't begin to stress this card.
Keep in mind that this video card from BFG
Technologies is NVIDIA's design through and through. BFG has not altered the
hardware/firmware of this card in any way. In short, any issues that arise
are directly attributed to NVIDIA's NV35 and not BFG Technolgies.
The tagline "TURN IT ALL ON" appears on the
front of the product box, so I did just that for every game. There's no
half-way stuff here, all games are dialed-up as high as they'll go in the
eye-candy department.
