3DMark06 has become pretty much the defacto standard in benchmarking video cards over the last two years. Although dependent on CPU processing power almost as much as the graphics card for getting high scores, it's still one of the first programs I load up when I test out new hardware. Overclocking the GTX 260 yields nearly 1000 more points.


3DMark Vantage is Futuremark's latest benchmark utility, and has become my favorite for load testing the GPU. Overclocking the GTX 260 here results in more than 3500 additional points, a whopping 45% increase. Obviously this benchmark is heavily GPU dependent.


Furmark is another relatively new benchmark and a good one to keep on file. For one it's free, and its fully customizable settings allow you to change resolution and level of anti-aliasing, something many other benchmark programs charge you for. I'm testing with three of the most commonly used resolutions, 1280x1024, 1680x1050 and 1920x1200. Here we see that the lower resolutions score fairly closely but upping the display to 1920x1200 causes a significant hit in performance.

Let's move on to some real game tests, starting with Crysis.