For one reason or another, many reviews forgo the use of sports titles in their benchmark suites. As a result, there are a number of sports fans who are left guessing how these products will perform with their favorite new games. The release of NBA Live 2003 looked to be a perfect opportunity to bring a sports title into my suite of benchmarks. This title combines incredible graphics with solid gameplay and an endless variety of camera angles. In order to truly appreciate the beautiful graphics of this game, a lower camera angle which puts you on the court beside the players is a necessity.

It should be no surprise that these stellar graphics come at a rather large performance cost. With no additional image quality settings enabled, performance averaged roughly 45fps throughout each resolution. The use of any enhanced image quality settings brought a painful performance hit to every resolution, in some cases bringing the average frame rate below 20fps.

Given the benchmark results, it is evident that the best combination of speed and visual quality comes from the high resolution of 1600x1200 without the use of antialiasing or anisotropic filtering. As illustrated within the animated image quality comparison earlier in the review, this combination yields excellent results.

Despite the fact that Need For Speed Hot Pursuit 2 is a title within an entirely different genre than NBA Live 2003, the performance of this game is nearly identical to the sports title. Evidently, the engines EA is using in these titles to produce such lush graphics is a bit too taxing when using enhanced image quality settings.

Performance is excellent throughout every resolution without using antialiasing or anisotropic filtering. Enabling these features brings an enormous performance penalty which causes frame rates to drop below acceptable levels. It should be noted that even in the retail version of the game, the maximum resolution you can select is 1280x1024. This is a shame because these cards appear to have the resources to run a resolution of 1600x1200 at excellent frame rates.

As was the case with NBA Live 2003, the best combination of features for this game would be the use of the highest resolution with the absence of any antialiasing or anisotropic filtering. Here, the user will find silky smooth gameplay with impressive graphics and visual quality.