Graphic Terrific II

Testing Your Graphic Processor
  When you are planning to test your graphic processor make sure you take up some nice 3D graphic intensive games for i.e. G-Police from Psygnosis, Incoming from Rage, Forsaken and Turok from Acclaim etc. Since we are thinking of games like Turok and G-Police, a good graphic card will not be able to work without a good processor so think of at least a Pentium II 333 with at least 64 MB of RAM, to get the best out of your card.
  Graphic cards can be tested into three main criteria : performance in 2D graphic processing, performance in handling the old but still popular DOS games, and Finally for 3D capabilities.

Test for 2D capability
  To simulate normal or routine tasks performance, test for 2D capabilities can be conducted with the help of graphic intensive macros for Word and Excel under Windows 95. Most 3D cards can easily perform well, so will yours.

Performance in DOS
  Though newer games are almost exclusively made for Windows 95/98, quite a few existing games do require good and fast DOS support. You can test the card performance under DOS with good old games like Duke Nukem 3D. This game have a frame counter that displays the frames per second (fps) value, which is used to determine how smoothly the game runs. Quake uses VESA mode of display which has to be implemented in the BIOS of the graphic card.

Performance in 3D
  When one talks about the current graphic cards and their 'performance', one means the computing power with which multiple 3D effects such as Alpha blending, bilinear or tri-linear filtering etc. are processed. You can test test following effects by running 3D intensive games like: G-Police from Psygnosis, Incoming from Rage, Forsaken and Turok from Acclaim etc. When you run the game or the demos of the games, you get the frame rate the card is capable of processing.
  Quake 2 uses OpenGL rather than DirectX and in the cards that have no drivers for this, Quake 2 uses a software emulation that, however, results in the loss of speed and quality. Even though most new cards can reckon with conideracly higher frame rates per second at the standard resolution of  640 x 480. When we run the test, all games should be operated at a resolution of  800 x 600 dpi (and wherever possible, at 120 MHz).

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