How we test graphics cards

Testing a graphics card is an extremely lengthy process. We sometimes see reviews where a graphics card has been tested using out of date equipment, out of date games and even out of date drivers. While the latter can be excused due to the sheer amount of driver updates making a thorough review impossible we will however notify the reader when we have used a different driver to the normal for example a pre-release driver. For the most part however we will always use the same hardware and latest drivers so this does certainly need to be taken into consideration when viewing our testing results. Each game and benchmark is tested times with the lowest and highest scores omitted out of the 5 results and the average then taken from the three remaining to give us our final result for each resolution and setting used.

Hardware

Taking Intel’s High-End Desktop platform, our hardware utilises the Intel X99 chipset. Combined with this we use the Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition processor clocked to a realistic and achievable 4GHz to ensure we have no CPU bottlenecks. With 16GB (4x4GB) of DDR4 at 2666MHz and a 750GB SSD there should be minimal paging so the benchmarks we run today will hopefully give a true reflection of the graphics card's performance.

Graphics Cards on test:
PowerColor Red Devil RX VEGA 56
ZOTAC GTX 1070 Ti AMP Extreme
NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti
NVIDIA GTX 1080
PowerColor RED DEVIL Golden Sample RX 580
ASUS STRIX GTX 1070
PowerColor RED DEVIL RX 470
NVIDIA GTX 1060
NVIDIA GTX 980
NVIDIA GTX 970
AMD Radeon RX 480
XFX R9 FURY
AMD Radeon R9 390X
Special thanks go to Epiphan, Intel, Corsair, MSI and AOC for providing the extreme spec components used for our test bench:



Benchmarks
If you are a regular reader of our reviews you will know we like to test the latest hardware with the latest games and benchmarks on the market. Here are the games we’ve chosen:



To capture framerates we use a combination of in-game benchmark tools, FRAPS and PresentMon.

We also take into consideration the benchmarkers out there so have included three of the more popular synthetic benchmarks available:


Let's see how today's graphics card performed...