le gritche wrote..well without a doubt a fast soundcard does offload sound decoding, and with multiple channels this isi even more important. im not disagreeing there. im disagreeing how the benchmark was done. a bit sloppily. since there are a few subtleties (sp?) that the author forgot to include.
in the article :
"Dropping the display resolution down to 1024x768 and turning off antialiasing and anisotropic filtering didn't really improve frame rates, so our graphics settings aren't going to be the bottleneck here. "
but yeah, I know it's boring to read the article you're commenting on.
i did read the entire article. if the author was benchmarking a video card, then altering settings which puts strain on the video card is what needs to be done, with other variables constant - memory size, memory speed, cpu speed, etc.
when testing anything CPU related, all other hardware must not be "in the way", ie bottlenecking. running at max graphics settings does not make the test fair, as any FPS fluctuations based on how much CPU is available to the renderer will be masked by the "slowness" of the video card caused by running at high settings. put simply, CPU speed is of little importance when its waiting for the video card to draw the next frame. if the author was using a 3ghz cpu, im positive he couldve gotten similar results using a slower CPU.
only thing i can think of is the author is trying to show us "realistic" settings of everyday gaming, to see how it affects the average gamer.
Comment