The Pentium 4 may not be as powerful as the Athlon 64, but today's games tend to become CPU bound with antialiasing enabled at higher resolutions on high-end graphics cards like the GeForce 7800 GT.
System Specifications
Intel Pentium 4 560 (3.6GHz)
Gigabyte GA-8GPNXP Duo
Mushkin 2GB (1GBx2) XP2
PC Power and Cooling Turbo-Cool 510W ATX-PFC
Maxtor 60GB Hard Drive
Samsung SyncMaster 900NF 19-inch CRT
32-Bit Color / Vsync Disabled / 85Hz Refresh rate
NVIDIA ForceWare WHQL Version 81.95 @ Quality Image
Intel INF Installation 7.2.1.1003
Windows XP Home with Service Pack 2
Microsoft DirectX 9.0c
MSI NX7800GT-VT2D256E Graphics Card
BIOS Settings
Memory Timing - 4-4-4-12
200MHZ Front Side Bus
Games Tested
F.E.A.R. - v1.02
Half-Life 2: Lost Coast Episode
Need for Speed: Most Wanted Demo
Unless otherwise noted, results are based on an average of three separate runs. Antialiasing and anisotropic filtering were applied by utilizing in-game settings whenever possible. Results from the Need for Speed: Most Wanted demo are based on gameplay scenarios while Fraps was used to collect frame rate data.
MSI NX7800GT-VT2D256E - End View
Click Image to Enlarge
In-game graphics options were enabled to their highest setting, except in F.E.A.R. where soft shadows were disabled in the majority of tests due to the extremely adverse effect on performance. However, soft shadows were enabled when their impact on performance was examined.
