Summer 2008 Graphics Performance Roundup

Well, after countless community requests and some arm twisting, but mostly because it started raining and we decided to stop playing Zombie Fluxx, come inside, and crack on with the benchmarks. Yes, it’s finally here (deep breath), the bit-tech Summer 2008 Graphics Card Performance Group Test! However, we’re confident that it’s been more than worth the wait, as we’ve performed one of the most in-depth and extensive hardware group tests to ever grace bit-tech in order to finally answer the pressing questions of modern graphics card performance: which card now sits atop the performance pile? Which holds the mid range performance crown? And most importantly, which should you spend your hard earned cash on?Needless to say that the last two months have been a hugely frantic time within the graphics industry, with both AMD and Nvidia launching impressive new graphics architectures and winding up the PR machines to spin out their latest GPUs.We’ve already looked at Nvidia’s GT200 architecture in some serious detail, and coverage of AMD/ATI’s R770 is on the way soon (we promise), but for this article the focus is on the boards these architectures have spawned and their performance where you, the consumer, will see the most difference – modern, graphically intensive games.For this purpose, we’ve gathered together the usual suspects of recent graphics cards, as well as the four new arrivals – Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 280 and 260 and ATI’s Radeon HD 4870 and HD 4850, and tested them in some of the most popular and graphically demanding games currently available, at varied high quality settings and resolutions. However, before we plough into the bevvy of benchmark scores (over 450 of them in fact), let’s look into current UK graphics card pricing, and see how much these slabs of silicon will cost.