Testing Setup

We have two basic testing scenarios which we will outline here. Hardware remained consistent between the two scenarios, with our testing being done on the following system...

• Gigabyte GA-965P-S3 Mainboard (F8 BIOS revision)
• Intel Core2 E6300 1.86ghz CPU (3.15ghz @ 450FSB)
• Two - 1GB DIMM's of DDR-2 PC2-8000 Crucial Ballistix Memory
• Seagate ST3120026AS 120GB SATA Drive
• Liteon 160P6S 16x DVD/RW Drive
• Airnet APS500 500W Power Supply
• Rosewill R6A34BK ATX Midtower case
• HannsG HW192 19” Widescreen DVI LCD Monitor (1440x900 Native Resolution)

A clean OS install was performed of both Windows XP SP2 x86, and Vista x64 Ultimate Edition. Under XP SP2, 97.92 WHQL Certified Nvidia Forceware drivers were installed. In the case of Vista x64, we installed the latest beta 101.41 Forceware driver. We installed the 5.05.25.00 version of Nvidia's Ntune application under both XP and Vista x64, which claims to be compatible with Vista x64 edition. It incorrectly fails to install key files in the SYSWOW64 folder, and even manually inserting these files fails to make Ntune behave under Vista.

We tested the card using the following software...

• Futuremark 3DMark05 v1.3.0 (XP Only)
• Futuremark 3DMark06 v1.1.0
• Half Life2 Episode 1
• Company Of Heroes v 1.5
• Prey Demo

Other software used... 

• ATITool 0.26 under XP
• Fraps 2.8.2
• HardwareOC PreyBench

Though it was initially developed as an ATI specific tool, ATITool also supports Nvidia cards, including the latest G80 GPU's. It's ability to allow visual artifact testing takes a lot of the guesswork out of GPU over clocking. 

Fraps 2.8.2 was used for capturing minimum, maximum, and average frame rates during testing of Half Life 2 and Company Of Heroes, as well as capturing screens. 

HardwareOC Preybench is a handy application for automating benchmarking of Prey. Being an OpenGL based gaming engine (Doom3, Quake4 share the same engine as Prey), we felt we needed to to more careful analysis of OpenGL between XP and Vista. The reasoning behind this will become apparent as we proceed. 

On to the benchmarks!!