So you bought Half-life 2 and Doom 3, then waited impatiently whilst CDs span and patches downloaded, only to find your Neolithic old graphics card just doesn't cut the mustard? Many people are finding themselves in this position, and most of us cant just go out and buy the fastest card available. This is the reason for this group test of four graphics cards, all around £100 or less.

Our contestants are:

To keep things simple, we haven't muddied the waters by running every benchmark under the sun; only actual Half-life 2 and Doom 3 benchmarks are shown. In keeping with this realistic approach, the test bed is representative of a good value enthusiasts system of about a year ago. The system is based around a Thoroughbred B core XP1800, and an nForce 2 motherboard, overclocked to a respectable 1.9 Ghz with 166mhz FSB and memory, which is 512 Mb of generic CAS 3.

Remember that there can be up to a 30% difference between frame rates archived with the same Graphics Card on different spec PCs. If your PC is slower than our testbed, it would be wise to avoid cards which are only just adequate on our testbed, and go for something with a little extra oomph to compensate for the slower PC.

These are all cards from the previous generation to the latest x800 and 6800 cards, but they still have support for AGP 8x, and most importantly, hardware DX 9 rendering capabilities. Both Doom 3 and Half-life 2 rely heavily on Direct X 9 extensions, and a lot of image quality will be lost if your card cannot support it.

Benchmarks

Doom 3 was run with "high" detail settings and advanced options turned off, and Half-life 2 with maximum settings. Neither was run with Anti-aliasing or Ansiostropic filtering. We all want our games to look good, but none of these budget cards have any hope of running Anti-aliasing or the ultra high texture settings in Doom 3.

It is worth noting that Half-Life 2 looks fine at medium detail settings, but in Doom 3 the graphical effects are such an essential part of the game that anything less than "high" detail settings look terrible and make the game difficult to play. Both games need a resolution of 800 x 600 for acceptable visual quality, but of course 1024 x 768 is much preferred.

With benchmark results as low as these, overclocking a graphics card can easily make the difference between playable and unplayable. This is why we have overclocked all the cards to see what they can do. A 120mm fan was aimed in the general direction of the AGP slot to give them a little encouragement, and we used ATI Tool and Coolbits for the ATI and Nvidia cards respectively. Bearing in mind that overclocking abilities vary greatly from card to card, we have only run a select few benchmarks at overclocked speeds, to give an idea of what the cards could be capable of.

Conclusions

This group test doesn't cover every single type of low end card on the market at the moment. The most notable omissions are the Geforce FX 5600, and the Radeon 9600 Pro and XT. Another option may be a second hand card, such as a Radeon 9700 Pro for example, which falls into the same price range.

The Radeon 9600 is the best card for those looking for a graphics card to play Half-Life 2 on a paperboys wage packet. The 9600 can be found everywhere, and offers the right performance at the lowest price. The card also has the benefits of passive cooling as standard, and potential for significant overclocking gains.

Unfortunately none of these budget cards was really able to do justice to Doom 3, and it seems any card in the sub-£100 range will leave the user at a disadvantage in online play. The best advice I can give to you Space Marines is to keep saving your pennies, and wait for the Spode's Abode high-end graphics card group test, coming soon.

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