Windows Benchmarks, Continued

Quake 4

Like Unreal Tournament 2004, Quake 4 is a slightly older engine. It remains relevant in that many games still use the engine such as Doom 3 and Quake Wars, and it also has a Linux port. Quake 4 was benchmarked using the highest settings available.

Half-Life 2

Half-Life 2 remains one of the most popular game engines due to the various "Source" games Valve has released, such as Counter-Strike: Source. Additionally, many incremental updates have been added to the game with the episode-style updates Valve released for the game. Half-Life 2 was benchmarked with both Episodes installed, and all settings set to the maximum available.

Windows Benchmarks, Continued

3dMark06

The benchmark is about two years old now, but still an effective way to look at a video card's performance.

3dMark Vantage

Futuremark's latest gaming benchmark is the pinnacle of gaming benchmarks and technology, as it may very well bring any setup to its very knees. Through a series of DirectX 10.1, Physics, and CPU tests, 3dMark Vantage measures every ounce of performance that a system is capable of, in every area the latest games utilize.

Conclusion on Windows Benchmarks

For all but one benchmark, the Palit GeForce 9600 GSO fell where I expected it to: behind the GeForce 8800GTX. The 9600 GSO does feature PCI-Express 2.0 support, which the 8800 GTX does not, but it is still clocked slower. It kept up in some of the newer benchmarks and games such as Unreal Tournament 3, but really surprised me when it blew past both the 8800 GTX and Radeon HD3870 in 3dMark Vantage score. My first guess was that it was the videocard offloading the physics of the game from the CPU to the GPU, but the 9600 series isn't yet supported for PhysX in the nVidia drivers.

Newer card, better score? I doubt that's the reason, but the only other thing I can think of is that there is a driver issue when it comes to 3dMark Vantage. This is something I'll have to look into further before making any further comment on the issue.

For a mid-range card, the 9600 GSO keeps up very well with the faster-clocked flagship cards.