BioShock
Our gaming tests kick off with the well known and highly praised BioShock. This game is a test of both DX9 and DX10 technologies, and its underwater setting can really push a rendering engine to the peak of performance. With that in mind, it’s interesting to note that the GTX 260 AMP! and the GTX 280 are neck and neck in terms of performance. I expected the overclocking done on the card to be of benefit, but I didn’t expect this. I’m curious if this may be an inconsistency in the way FRAPS (the software used to generated these results) benchmarks performance. We’ll have to see further on.
Playability wasn’t an issue. At these frame rates, most of the areas I travelled through never lagged and barely ever dropped below 40 FPS. There are supposedly areas of the game that are extremely tortuous on a video card, but being that I’m too busy benchmarking, writing, and working, I’ve never reached these areas.
Supreme Commander
Our only RTS title in benchmarking is Supreme Commander, and it comes with a built in benchmark that produces a composite test similar to what 3DMark uses. Once again our testing using this benchmark turned up some interesting results, with the GTX 260 AMP! posting results similar to those seen in the 9800GTX we reviewed near the beginning of the year. Still the performance difference between the GTX 260 AMP! and the GTX 280 aren’t that significant, with only a 2% difference between the two cards.
It’s really hard to find an RTS game that truly tests modern video cards. With that said, it’s pretty clear that gameplay in Supreme Commander was nothing more than smooth and clean with the GTX 260 AMP!. The many battles between the three factions in that game were rendered beautifully.
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