Call of Duity sees the 2600 XT do pretty nicely with a small lead in Maximum and Average FPS. Playing Call of Duty 2 was a decent experience with the cards, although at points there was lag not FPS related. After a lot of checking and re-installing it seemed to be a driver related problem.

F.E.A.R.

F.E.A.R. is a game based on an engine that uses many features of DirectX 9.0c. It has volumetric lighting, soft shadows, parallax mapping and particle effects, with a slow-motion mode that really taxes today's top of the line GPU's. I played a fully updated game with the latest patches installed. I played three two-minute runs on a taxing part of the game with plenty of action, using slow-motion for the full time whilst firing at enemy soldiers and using grenades that produce a cool "blast" contortion effect when blown up.

The cards were played at 1280 x 1024 with 4 x AA, 4 x FSAA and soft shadows disabled. All other settings were on maximum.

However upon playing through F.E.A.R. the 2600's both fall well behind. It has to be said that the gaming experience whilst playing F.E.A.R. was pretty poor even at 1280 x 1024, due to inconsistant frame rates.

Oblivion

Oblivion is an awesome RPG with a simply huge immersive environment, great graphics and incredibly realistic scenery. This game is currently one of the most testing games that you can buy and it is certainly a test of the high-end cards here. I chose to do a run-through of the Arena part of the game. I spoke to a character, did some magic whilst in a fight and fought in the arena that is pretty huge. Also as well as doing this test I took a wander around to make sure that the benchmark resembled the general gameplay with each card. In-game settings used:

Oblivion was played at 1280 x 1024 with HDR enabled and no AA.