Games
I chose three games for our benchmarking, and each for good reason. We have Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Team Fortress 2, Crysis: Warhead. Now this list seems pretty normal. We have BF:BC2 which came out earlier this year and works with DirectX 11, the quintessential Crysis benchmark to show what your new graphics card can’t do, but then we have Team Fortress 2. TF2 is not a particularly demanding game for desktop level graphics cards, but it is a very popular game. It’s also a game a lot of people play on their cheap college entry level laptops, and now they want to upgrade to a desktop on a up-paid college students salary of $0+parents. It’s also one of my favorite games.
Battlefield: Bad Company 2
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 came out earlier this year to much praise by PC users for making a good PC game while Activision gimped the PC version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 by not allowing servers. I’ve been playing since the beta, and while I’m not level 50, I still have a lot of fun playing. To test this game out I used FRAPS to check the minimum, maximum, and average FPS of the game. Because this game is taxing on mid range cards, I ran the tests on 4 different settings. Advanced with x16AA, then the default HIGH, MEDIUM, and LOW settings all at 1920×1200. From what I could tell, BF:BC2 does not allow you to change between DX9, 10, and 11, but instead defaults to the best one, so all of these tests are with DirectX 11.
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is a somewhat intense game graphically, but it has some great scalability. As, you can see running this game on Med shouldn’t be too hard, and keep in mind, I ran this at 1920×1200.
Team Fortress 2
Team Fortress 2 is easily one of the most popular PC games even though it came out 3 years ago. While it’s not terribly demanding, it does require decent graphics card to run on the highest settings at 1920×1200. For this test, I ran FRAPS for 60 seconds while in game. Here are my results:
No big surprise here. I sure do love TF2 – Flash Gordon – Demoman.
Those are some pretty impressive specs! I have never tried a Sparkle video card before, but I’ve heard great things about them recently so I might consider it in a couple months.
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