Mid-Range System Setup:

AMD Athlon 64 3700+ (operating at 2200MHz, 11x200MHz); ABIT AN8 32X (NVIDIA nForce4 SLI X16); 1 x 512MB Corsair (operating in single channel at 400MHz with 2-2-2-5-1T timings); Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 200GB 7,200RPM SATA II hard disk drive; AC '97 on-board sound; OCZ PowerStream 600W power supply unit; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; NVIDIA nForce4 SLI X16 platform drivers, version 6.82.

Video Cards:

• HIS Radeon X850XT IceQ II iTurbo 256MB - operating at its default clock speeds of 520/1080MHz using Catalyst 6.4 WHQL;
  
• BFG Tech GeForce 6800 GT OC 256MB - operating at its default clock speeds of 370/1000MHz using Forceware 84.43, available from nZone;
  
• HIS Radeon X1600XT IceQ iTurbo 256MB - operating at its default clock speeds of 587/1380MHz using Catalyst 6.4 WHQL;
  
• BFG Tech GeForce 6600 GT OC 128MB - operating at its default clock speeds of 525/1050MHz using Forceware 84.43, available from nZone.

Our Mid-Range test cards are all well above the recommended specification of a Radeon 9800XT or an GeForce FX5950, with all but the GeForce 6600GT having 256MB of memory, double that of the 9800 and 5950.

However, our system only uses 512MB of RAM, half the recommended spec, and we did see some problems with stuttering and stalling on all of the configurations due to this. We tried lowering the texture detail on all of our cards, but received negligible performance increases on our test rig. The extra graphics RAM seemed to compensate, however.

This allowed us to play the game with most of the settings up full – even the textures. Where we had to compromise, though, was with Shadows and Advanced Shaders. We lowered the Shadow draw distance to 50% and disabled the Advanced Shaders, which gave us enough of a performance boost to run the game with at least 2x AA on all our systems.

We found a massive discrepancy in performance between the towns and outlying zones. While the low FPS in towns may be an irritation it doesn’t affect gameplay too badly. However, to gain extra speed in towns you could try lowering the LOD sliders to a closer distance. Adjusting the slider settings can be done in game, without the need for a restart, so you can strip any surplus detail from the world, quickly and easily.

The greatest performance increases for most people, though, will be to lower the Shadow slider to close. If you’re having problems with high quality Shadows you should try Medium quality before you just turn them off. All our mid-range cards performed very well with just the Shadow Quality at Medium, and the shadow distance slider set half way.

Overall, you can get a great experience on any of these cards - the gaming isn't outrageously demanding.