Graphics balls against the benchmark wall

First up is this analysis of the new Team Fortress 2 beta from Valve. Since TF2 is based on the Half-Life 2 engine, there should be no surprises here - but then again, the cartoony-graphical style is a long way from HL2's gorgeous landscapes.

The Radeon HD 2600 XT manages to beat out an overclocked 8600 GT, which is surely some cause for pleasure inside DAAMIT, since it means that the 2600 XT will beat a standard 8600 GT without too much hassle. However, the rest of the field runs as expected - a massive jump in performance from the 8600/2600 series cards up to the 8800 GTS, which runs faster than any man could possibly require.

Meanwhile, Techspot has gone crazy with Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, the latest Id Software shooter. Running at high quality with 4xAA/8xAF, on Vista no less, The 8800 GTS beats the 2900 XT, although gamers with older hardware may be pleased to know that the X1950 XT stomps on the 7900 GS by a 15 per cent margin, or thereabouts.

Both those cards are able to deal admirable damage to the 8600 GTS and 2600 XT, which languish at the bottom of the graph at fully half the performance.

Lastly, whilst multi-GPU performance has been a nightmare for both ATI and Nvidia on Vista, that hasn't stopped Neoseeker pitting SLI v CrossFire in a DX10 battle to the death.

Interestingly, testing in Bioshock, the DX10 shooter du jour, the Radeon HD actually performs better in single card mode than CrossFire. The Nvidia cards, however, have no problem doubling up for SLI, although performance is slightly grim - dual 8800 GTX cards providing just 60 FPS at 1920x1440.

The conclusion? Perhaps unsurprisingly, Nvidia still has no credible challenger at the high end, PC games - bar Bioshock - aren't really stretching the hardware at the moment, and the 2600 may be a surprisingly nippy card, but DX10 support isn't worth much when your older, uglier sister is able to push pixels faster and harder. Erk. µ