13 - Colin McRae 05

For all you racing fans out there, this test is for you and will represent the Racing game category in our benchmarks.

From the graphics point of view the first thing you'll notice in the game, is the excellent amount of detail on your racing car. High resolution textures on the car and lighting make it quite impressive. All the eye candy, such as the sun reflection in the virtual camera are still the same as the older CM versions but motion blur has been added when your car hits something hard which will happen most often if you're new to the racing simulation world.

To measure performance on the game, we used fraps to get the average fps of the whole 8th stage of UK which is actually the only stage you get to play on the demo.

The 131 fps rate seems to be our CPU limit using our top-notch AMD Athlon FX-55. The card can deliver more than that but the proccessor can't cope with it. The two 6800s seem about equal in power with perhaps a slender lead from MSI's NX6800 Ultra.

Running the game with 8x anisotropic filtering and 4x AntiAliasing, the difference immediately increases but descends as we move on to higher resolutions. Even so, both cards seem to have no trouble running the game under any setting.