The Rules
First of all, I decided that this had to be a review of realistic gaming benchmarks. The only thing of interest to me - as a gamer - is how well games will run at good settings and resolution. I immediately realised that if I did this wrong, I'd be accused of cherry picking benchmarks - so I decided upon the following rules which hopefully everybody will see as sensible and balanced.
1) The minimum resolution counted will be 1680x1050.
I realise a lot of people still use 1280x1024 screens, however most of these people simply would not use these high end cpu's for gaming.
2) The maximum resolution counted will be 1920x1200.
Very often, 2560x1200 is a total bottleneck on graphics cards - this claim is often made against AMD cpu's, so I felt that by leaving out 2560x1200, it should act as a counter to 1280x1024 and below.
3) With that in mind, I decided that if multiple benchmarks were made at the same resolution, different settings, I would take the middle setting, or the one closest to what is likely to be used.
Game benchmarks with 300fps, no AA, no AF etc...are out. However if the game was *only* benchmarked at those settings, they would be used - AA and AF settings would only be used in preference if available.
note - while looking through the list of benchmarks, this was hardly an issue. I believe only two out of all the websites I have used actually bothered with different settings at the same resolution.
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