Tomb Raider: Anniversary - FPS

	Min	Max	Avg
HIS Radeon HD 2600 Pro IceQ 512MB	26	126	86.275
MSI NX8600GT OC Edition 256MB	86	136	116.95

Tomb Raider: Anniversary offers some great visuals but you really do need a card that can give you anti-aliasing to get the best from the game. The MSI card easily does that, and much like stalker, isn't that far off offering 4x anisotropic filtering.

Tomb Raider: Anniversary - Image Quality

HIS Radeon HD 2600 Pro left, Nvidia 8600GT right

One of my favourite levels in the first Tomb Raider and again in Anniversary is the section under St Folly's. The MSI card displays it very well indeed.

Lost Planet: Extreme Conditions DX10 Demo - FPS

	Min	Max	Avg
HIS Radeon HD 2600 Pro IceQ 512MB	7	17	11.95
MSI NX8600GT OC Edition 256MB	12	38	25.258

A definitive win for the MSI card, but to be perfectly honest it's not a great result for the MSI NX8600GT OC Edition either. It's just not enough FPS to make the gameplay experience a smooth one.

Lost Planet: Extreme Conditions DX10 Demo - Image Quality

HIS Radeon HD 2600 Pro left, Nvidia 8600GT right

Regardless of anything I or you can see in the above image, the one thing it doesn't convey is the judder and blur caused by the motion of the game in action. Before we can make any real comments on image quality, we really need to get a decent frame rate, one that doesn't require as much blurring to try and create (and at these frame rates, fail) the illusion of smoothness. The MSI card comes close, but not close enough often enough.

Video Decoding

Testing

Test System: AMD X2 3800+, MSI K8N SLI Platinum, 2x 1GB Corsair PC-3200 Pro, Windows XP Pro 32bit, Catalyst version 7.7, Dell 2005FPW 20.1” Widescreen Monitor and/or Sony KDFEA12U 50” Rear Projection (720p/1080i)

You'll note that we have swapped systems from the Intel setup so as to reduce the CPU power as much as possible. Cyberlink's PowerDVD Ultra 7.3 was used for testing where applicable as it is capable of HD-DVD/Blu-ray playback (for future use) and has support for the features of the card.

MPEG2 – We used a 2 minute capture of Monsters Inc at 1080i, specifically the scene in the restaurant. Peak Mbps for this clip was recorded at 26.84Mbps and an average of 17Mbps. We recorded the average CPU usage during playback, lower numbers are better.

De-interlacing – Using a small test clip of a pendulum swinging, we visually tested the effects of the cards de-interlacing capabilities. We backed this up with playback of the opening 3 minutes of Will Smith's I, Robot converted from DVD to 1080i.

MPEG4 AVC – 1080p, 21.02Mbps Peak, while not exactly going to stress a system too much, the Batman Begins trailer will offer enough of a performance test for our purposes. Like the MPEG2 test, we recorded the average CPU usage, lower numbers are better.

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