Page 9

A quick chat about "FPS"

What are we looking for in gaming performance wise? First off, obviously Guru3D tends to think that all games should be played at the best image quality (IQ) possible. There's a dilemma though, IQ often interferes massively with the performance of a graphics card. We measure this performance with an outcome which is called FPS, the number of frames a graphics card can render per second. The higher it is the more fluently your game will display itself.

A game's frames per second (FPS) is a measured average of a series of tests. That test often is a timedemo, a recorded part of the game which is a 1:1 representation of the actual game and it's gameplay experience. After forcing the same image quality settings; this timedemo is then used for all graphics cards so that the actual measuring is as objective as can be.

• So if a graphics card barely manages less than 30 FPS then the game is not very playable, we want to avoid that at all cost.
• With 30 FPS up-to roughly 40 FPS you'll be very able to play the game with perhaps a tiny stutter at certain graphically intensive parts. Overall a very enjoyable experience. Match the best possible resolution to this result and you'll have the best possible rendering quality versus resolution, hey you want both of them to be as high as possible.
• When a graphics card is doing 60 FPS on average or higher then you can rest assured that the game will likely play extremely smoothly at every point in the game, turn on every possible in-game IQ setting.
• Over 100 FPS? You have either a MONSTER of graphics card or a very old game.

Gaming test: DiRT - Colin McRae

The Colin McRae games have been entertaining us for almost 10 years and recently Codemasters had taken a break. But now theyre back and what theyve brought out is simply a stunner as far as Im concerned. If you hate racers, then keep your suspicions but at least try the demo.

One of the things that really add to that fun is the way that the cars and the racing surface itself incur damage.  You'll start out with a pristine ride that looks like it rolled off the showroom floor moments ago and end with a car that is at the very least caked with dust and dirt. 

The graphics provided by the game's Neon engine are impressive as hell.  Not only do the cars look like their real-life counterparts, the environments look so much like the real world it's frightening.  Grass and shrubs wave in the breeze and react to your car's passing accordingly.  Dust and particles kicked up look just like the real thing - I half expected a ding in my TV screen from a wayward rock, just like you might get in your windshield when driving behind an eighteen wheeler on the freeway.

As amazing as the game looks, all that detail comes at a bit of a price. Performance is not always up to snuff, especially in races with multiple cars on the track. The frame rate is a little choppy during single-car rallies, but once you get a group of other cars racing with you, the game practically turns into stop-motion animation, especially if all the other cars happen to be bunched up with you.

This literally has to be one of the worst console ports I have seen to date. It'll crush performance, so no-matter what kind of graphics card you have, you'll have to forfeit in image quality settings in the game. We follow our guidelines and have High Quality enabled for all cards,

When you are purchasing something in the mid-range market you'll be forced to set and select medium image quality settings in order to be able to play this game. We do have 4xAA AA enabled. We play a Rally World, Single Race at Canberra Park in Australia in a FIAT Grande Punto. Have a look at performance, ouch !

For your information, we moved on and all our tests have been done on Windows Vista Business edition; as we are slowly seeing some DX10 titles.

Just silly performance here.

Gaming test: Prey

Prey tells the story of Tommy, a Cherokee garage mechanic stuck on a reservation going nowhere. Abducted along with his people to a menacing mother ship orbiting Earth, he sets out to save himself and his girlfriend and eventually his planet.

In Prey, players enter a living spaceship that enslaves alien races and devours humans for lunch. Prey turns the first-person-shooter genre upside-down with new gameplay features like wall-walking and gravity flipping, making for intense single- and multiplayer experiences. Prey is built on a heavily modified version of the Doom 3 engine and is developed by Human Head Studios under the direction of 3D Realms.

Prey remains to be a fantastic title. Lovely to play and look at. The HD 2600 XT from HiS actually does really nice numbers here. 4xAA and 16xAF is enabled.