VGA Image Quality Settings and Test System
Graphics (VGA) performance Recording Level and IQ settings
Before we begin with the graphics performance tests a little explanation. We use a time based measurement based upon framerate recording. The test is a representative for any modern age GPU. Our rather settings are:
You will notice we keep HBAO and Super Sampling off for now. Also if you want faster load times, turn of the caches. That said, in game you could get a fwe more stutters. Preload it all and the game load time will be hefty, but the game-play is more smooth.
For all our graphics performance tests we apply the quality settings as shown above at 2xSMAA. Some older mid-range card can struggle at these settings. So if that happens to you simply disable MSAA and you should be fairly fine, but we'll show you that over the next few pages. SMAA is a Morphological Anti Aliasing Technique just as MLAA and FXAA. The performance impact is much smaller than FXAA, which on its end has a performance impact many times smaller than MSAA.
The graphics cards used in this specific article are:
- GeForce GTX 760
- GeForce GTX 770
- GeForce GTX 780
- GeForce GTX 780 Ti
- GeForce GTX 970
- GeForce GTX 980
- GeForce GTX Titan Black
- Radeon HD 7970 GHz
- Radeon R7 260X
- Radeon R9 270X
- Radeon R9 280X
- Radeon R9 290
- Radeon R9 290X
Our test system is based on a powerful eight-core Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition with Haswell-E based setup on the X99 chipset platform. This setup is overclocked to 4.40 GHz on all cores. Next to that we have energy saving functions disabled for this motherboard and processor (to ensure consistent benchmark results). We use Windows 8.1 all patched up. Each card runs on the same PC with the same operating system clone.
- GeForce cards use the latest 344.60 driver.
- AMD Radeon graphics cards we used the latest 14.9.1 Beta driver.
