Testing Notes & Methodology
Our performance review is comprised of 20 graphics card configurations from AMD and Nvidia across all price ranges. The latest official drivers were used for all cards and we overclocked the Intel Core i7 920 processor to 3.70GHz in an attempt to remove any CPU bottlenecks.
We used Fraps to measure frame rates during a minute of gameplay from the campaign mode to save the Ark. The level is titled "What-If: Copper Down," and there's nothing particularly unusual about it, so it should make for a fair evaluation of overall game performance.
Brink was tested at four resolutions: 1280x800, 1680x1050, 1920x1200 and 2560x1600 with anti-aliasing enabled. Other quality settings include Motion Blur, High Quality Post Processing and Ambient Occlusion while Shadow and Texture quality were both set to high.
It's worth noting that our results have been recorded using Brink's third patch, which significantly improves performance when using Ambient Occlusion. Furthermore, while SLI is working well, we're still waiting on AMD to offer Crossfire support, which should come soon.
CPU scaling performance has been included on this article along with graphics. We clocked our Core i7 processor at a range of frequencies to see how that affects performance. We also ran similar tests to compare various AMD and Intel processors.
We'll be looking for an average of 60fps for stutter-free gameplay.
Test System Specs
- Intel Core i7 920 (Overclocked @ 3.70GHz)
- x3 2GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-12800 (CAS 8-8-8-20)
- Asus P6T Deluxe (Intel X58)
- OCZ ZX Series 1250w
- Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB (SATA 6Gb/s)
- GeForce GTX 590 (3072MB)
- GeForce GTX 580 (1536MB)
- GeForce GTX 570 (1280MB)
- GeForce GTX 560 Ti (1024MB)
- GeForce GTX 550 Ti (1024MB)
- GeForce GTX 480 (1536MB)
- GeForce GTX 470 (1280MB)
- GeForce GTX 460 (1024MB)
- GeForce GTS 450 (1024MB)
- Radeon HD 6970 (2048MB)
- Radeon HD 6950 (2048MB)
- Radeon HD 6870 (1024MB)
- Radeon HD 6850 (1024MB)
- Radeon HD 5870 (2048MB)
- Radeon HD 5830 (1024MB)
- Radeon HD 6790 (1024MB)
- Radeon HD 6770 (1024MB)
- Radeon HD 6750 (1024MB)
- Radeon HD 6670 (1024MB)
- Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
- Nvidia Forceware 270.61
- ATI Catalyst 11.5