The Games of Christmas '08: GPU Performance Part 1

X3: Terran Conflict: GPU Performance

After playing through the game trying to find a suitable zone for benchmarking purposes, we finally gave up and began using the stand-alone benchmarking tool from Egosoft. Believe it or not, after over 20 hours playing X3: Terran Conflict, it seems the benchmarking tool combines the worst and best case scenarios of the game quite accurately. The minimum framerates you see here are the averages for the 4 sections of the benchmark.

1680 X 1050



2560 X 1600


It seems like Nvidia’s driver team still needs to do a bit of work with this game’s overall performance on their cards. That being said, the GTX 200-series stages a 9th inning rally to pull slightly ahead of their ATI counterparts. The HD 4870 X2 leads the pack in every test but it was interesting to see the HD 4850 loose some ground to the 9800 GTX+ when AA was turned on at 1680 X 1050.