Guide to Holistic Benchmarking

When choosing a 3D graphics card it is important to remember what exactly you are planning to do with it. There are different types of boards: if you are satisfied with your 2D performance and your existing card can support a 3D board via its feature connector you may decide on a daughterboard to provide you with fast 3D; If you are looking for a complete upgrade, then a board which offers both fast 2D and 3D is going to be the better choice. Whichever solution you decide to implement the trade-off between price, speed and image quality will remain.

Benchmarks have a tendency to imply that speed is the only important feature of a product. When choosing a card there are many other factors which must be taken into account. There will always be a better system; this is the nature of the IT industry. What is important is balancing the cost justification against the system improvement. 3D cards offer two kinds of image improvement: picture quality and smoothness (increased frame rate). Depending on your reasons for upgrading, the two factors will weigh differently and depend on personal preference. Some games players may prefer just to go for a faster card, or else a slightly slower card with a better picture quality.

Final Reality™ accesses this in an overall score. This score is intended for those who do not themselves wish to balance the tie-off between speed and image quality.

Also, when choosing a card, it is important to judge other factors such as compatibility. The following list (in no particular order) is a good starting point :

Is it within my price range?

Is it compatible and does it take advantage of my operating system?

Is there much commercial support?

What are the terms of the technical support?

Can I install it myself?

Does it support plug and play (Windows 95 users)?

How many games does the accelerator support?

Is it easy to get driver updates?

How stable are the drivers?

When you are upgrading a PC system you want to minimise bottlenecks and 3D cards will provide a huge performance increase on any PC. It allows the CPU freedom from calculating the entire rendering and special 3D effects (software rendering), leaving the 3D accelerator to do all the work.

3D performance is also dependent on CPU performance. The CPU is used to create the geometrical performance of a 3D scene as well as other features, such as controlling the music in a game. Note that in the future some cards will support geometrical processing on-board, thereby freeing-up the processor even more!

In the future, the bus could be a potential bottleneck as games gain ever-increasing realism and larger textures will need to be transferred quickly to the graphic device. This problem is addressed by the AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) chipset motherboard and AGP graphics adapter.

The process can be a lot simpler. VNU publications have experienced reviewers who will help you make your decision. Our reviews will make a close examination of the scores achieved in Final Reality™ and will use the results as a starting point for their evaluation. Taking the detailed information, the reviewers will balance and weigh up the pro and cons of each package before finally writing informed editorial. We call this approach “Holistic” because reviewers step back to consider the entire package, rather than examine a graph in isolation.

Holistic Reviewing examines everything; from the installation to performance, to the documentation.