Test notes
You may notice that I didn't engage in a lot of GPU geekery this time around. I decided instead to focus on testing these new video cards across a range of the amazing new games and game engines coming out. These GPUs are basically "refresh" parts based on existing technology, and their most compelling attributes, in my view, are their incredibly strong price-performance ratios.

In order to give you a better sense of perspective on the price-performance front, I've included a couple of older video cards, in addition to a whole range of new cards. Roughly a year ago, the Radeon X1950 Pro faced off against the GeForce 7900 GS at $199. This year's crop of similarly priced GPUs have some substantial advantages in terms of specifications and theoretical throughput, but as you'll see, the gains they offer in real-world performance are even larger—and they do it while delivering image quality that's sometimes quite noticeably superior to last year's models, as well.

You'll find results for both the X1950 Pro and the 7900 GS in several of our gaming tests and in our power and noise measurements. I've had to limit their participation to scripted benchmarks because these cards were generally too slow to handle the settings at which we tested manually with FRAPS.

That leads me to another issue. As I said, the older cards couldn't handle some of the settings we used because, well, they're quite intensive, with very high resolutions, quality levels, or both. We tested at these settings because we wanted to push the cards to their limits in order to show meaningful performance differences between them. That's hard to do without hitting a CPU or system-level bottleneck, especially with cards this fast running in multi-GPU configurations. We did test at multiple quality levels with a couple of games in order to give you a sense of performance scaling, which should help.

Also, please note that many of the GeForce cards in the tables below are clocked at higher-than-stock speeds. Nvidia's board vendors have made a practice of selling their products at multiple clock speeds, and some of our examples are these hot-clocked variants. For instance, the 8800 GTS cards are all clocked at 575MHz (or in the case of the one XFX 320MB card, 580MHz) core clocks and correspondingly higher shader clocks. Obviously, that's going to change the performance picture. We think it makes sense to include these cards because they're typically fairly plentiful and available for not much of a premium over stock-clocked versions. They're what we might buy for ourselves.

The one exception to that rule, at least right now, may be the GeForce 8800 GT. The first wave of these cards looks to have sold out at many online vendors, and all variants are going for something of a premium right now—especially the higher clocked ones. We have included one "overclocked" version of the 8800 GT (from MSI) in our tests in order to show you its performance. This card is very fast, but be aware that it is not currently a $199 or even a $249 option.

Our testing methods
As ever, we did our best to deliver clean benchmark numbers. Tests were run at least three times, and the results were averaged.

Our test systems were configured like so:

Thanks to Corsair for providing us with memory for our testing. Their quality, service, and support are easily superior to no-name DIMMs.

Our test systems were powered by PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750W power supply units. The Silencer 750W was a runaway Editor's Choice winner in our epic 11-way power supply roundup, so it seemed like a fitting choice for our test rigs. Thanks to OCZ for providing these units for our use in testing.

Unless otherwise specified, image quality settings for the graphics cards were left at the control panel defaults. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

• Unreal Tournament 3 demo
• Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
• Enemy Territory: Quake Wars 1.2
• BioShock 1.0 with DirectX 10
• TimeShift 1.2
• FRAPS 2.9.2

The tests and methods we employ are generally publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.