We at GruntvillE take a great deal of pride in telling you, the readers,
what the real deal is with everything we review. We try to be as objective
as possible and tell you about all the things that matter, and most
importantly, to be consistent. Being consistent is one of the most
important things in reviewing products. We want our readers to know
that when we say a product is GruntvillE RecommendeD that they will
know it is worth every penny they spend on it, every time.
With
that in mind, we have spent a great deal of time creating a suite
of meaningful and useful benchmark measurements for our reviews
that all the writers will use. This is the first review that utilizes
the new GruntvillE Video Benchmarks so we thought it would be a
good time to tell you a little about what goes into generating all
those numbers and charts we use for the reviews. In the future all
reviews will have links back to pages that describe the process
for that particular review.
When
setting out to create a video card suite of benchmarks, we quickly
realized that the sheer number of benchmarks that can be run
is overwhelming. We also did not want to rely solely on synthetic
benchmarks such as 3DMark03 due to the recent, and past, “issues”
with different vendors “optimizing” drivers. While
we still include those types of benchmarks due to their sheer popularity,
they are by no means the only suite of applications that we will
use to test products.
Today’s
video cards need to support three standards to make themselves
good gaming cards: OpenGL, DirectX 8.1, and DirectX 9. To address
this we have selected the following benchmarks:
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We install a fresh copy of Windows XP Professional with all the latest
patches and updates. We then install all the software required for
the benchmarks and the appropriate patches for them. To
provide you with as complete a picture as possible, we run each
benchmark at three different resolutions,
1024x768, 1280x1024, and 1600x1200. We also run each of them 3
times and use the average score. For those of you keeping
track, that
is 9 benchmarks 3 times each at 3 different resolutions (except
for SPECViewPerf and 3DMark2001 which are run at only 1 resolution).
So in total we run 69 benchmarks, at stock speeds. Then we run
all of them (except SPECViewPerf) at overclocked speeds. Brining
the
total up to 135 benchmarks run on each video card. This would
not be possible if it wasn’t for
a nifty utility called Benchemall. Benchemall will run all the
above benchmarks (with the exception of Aquamark3) in a batch
format, and run them with each resolution producing a text file
with all of the results. This has made benchmarking the video
cards so much easier of a task that it is almost not fair. Keep your eyes open for a whole section on the site
about how and why we do the benchmarks we do.
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