Hi all:
When we posted our HD 4890 vs. GTX 275 article last month, we found an obvious issue after-the-fact. While many other sites out there showed the two cards to be quite comparable, our results favored NVIDIA overall... and this is a problem. One explanation is that the titles we're currently using have been used since last December, and many of them favor NVIDIA today.
In December, that wasn't the case. As seen in our HD 4870 vs. GTX 260/216, both ATI's and NVIDIA's equivalent offerings fared well throughout all of our tests, and in the end, the performance was pretty-much equaled. Certainly not the case now though, and NVIDIA has obviously released driver enhancements to improve many of the titles we still use. So... we need a change.
Due to the sheer amount of testing involved, I usually try to put off our testing suite for as long as possible, but we clearly are due for a change. Once we have a new game suite, I don't expect to be able to re-benchmark every card we have that quickly, but I will get as many done as quickly as possible. I'll mainly focus on current cards though, not last-gen, if I can help it. We manually benchmark each and every card / game configuration, and that's obviously extremely time-consuming.
So my question is, how about some recommendations of what we should use? What would YOU like to see us use, that would give both companies an equal chance at success? Here's how our suite looks now:
Crysis Warhead
Call of Duty: World at War
Far Cry 2
Left 4 Dead
Mirror's Edge
Need for Speed: Undercover
We also include 3DMark Vantage results, but I personally consider those to be rather useless. There's still a demand for such results though, so I don't see us ceasing use anytime soon.
The obvious games to rid would be Far Cry 2 (mostly because I can't stand it anymore), and Mirror's Edge. I'd also be removing Left 4 Dead, because, well, I can't stand that one anymore either (
) and due to the game's mechanics, it takes far more than two or three playthroughs to achieve an accurate result. Also, that game happens to run well on <em>any</em> current GPU (even low-end) all the way up to 2560x1600 4xAA, so including it is a little needless.
Since the last time we revised our game suite, there have been a few good high-end titles to come out that might be worth including going forward. Of these, F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin and Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X immediately come to mind, although the latter I'm a bit skeptical about (achieving accurate and repeatable scores in a flight game seems a little sketchy, but I could be wrong). F.E.A.R. 2 is "best played" on NVIDIA, while H.A.W.X is on ATI's side.
So, without making this into a novel, do you guys have any recommendations for games you'd like to see us use for testing in our next suite revision? Specific reasons of why would be great too!
When we posted our HD 4890 vs. GTX 275 article last month, we found an obvious issue after-the-fact. While many other sites out there showed the two cards to be quite comparable, our results favored NVIDIA overall... and this is a problem. One explanation is that the titles we're currently using have been used since last December, and many of them favor NVIDIA today.
In December, that wasn't the case. As seen in our HD 4870 vs. GTX 260/216, both ATI's and NVIDIA's equivalent offerings fared well throughout all of our tests, and in the end, the performance was pretty-much equaled. Certainly not the case now though, and NVIDIA has obviously released driver enhancements to improve many of the titles we still use. So... we need a change.
Due to the sheer amount of testing involved, I usually try to put off our testing suite for as long as possible, but we clearly are due for a change. Once we have a new game suite, I don't expect to be able to re-benchmark every card we have that quickly, but I will get as many done as quickly as possible. I'll mainly focus on current cards though, not last-gen, if I can help it. We manually benchmark each and every card / game configuration, and that's obviously extremely time-consuming.
So my question is, how about some recommendations of what we should use? What would YOU like to see us use, that would give both companies an equal chance at success? Here's how our suite looks now:
Crysis Warhead
Call of Duty: World at War
Far Cry 2
Left 4 Dead
Mirror's Edge
Need for Speed: Undercover
We also include 3DMark Vantage results, but I personally consider those to be rather useless. There's still a demand for such results though, so I don't see us ceasing use anytime soon.
The obvious games to rid would be Far Cry 2 (mostly because I can't stand it anymore), and Mirror's Edge. I'd also be removing Left 4 Dead, because, well, I can't stand that one anymore either (
) and due to the game's mechanics, it takes far more than two or three playthroughs to achieve an accurate result. Also, that game happens to run well on <em>any</em> current GPU (even low-end) all the way up to 2560x1600 4xAA, so including it is a little needless.Since the last time we revised our game suite, there have been a few good high-end titles to come out that might be worth including going forward. Of these, F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin and Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X immediately come to mind, although the latter I'm a bit skeptical about (achieving accurate and repeatable scores in a flight game seems a little sketchy, but I could be wrong). F.E.A.R. 2 is "best played" on NVIDIA, while H.A.W.X is on ATI's side.
So, without making this into a novel, do you guys have any recommendations for games you'd like to see us use for testing in our next suite revision? Specific reasons of why would be great too!
