The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay is based on the movie franchise of the same name, and provides a wild mix of kick-ass action and intriguing game environments. This hybrid game is similar to what Half-Life brought to the table, as you take the role of escaped con Riddick, and fight your way through some exceptionally rendered game levels. The in-game detail levels are also an important consideration, as moving the Shader Model above 2.0 can turn the game into a slide show on older cards, and even at SM 2.0, the game can bring most hardware to its knees.
Chronicles of Riddick is another game benchmark that really pushes our graphics cards to the limit, and at least using standard details, looks to provide another challenge for the Gigabyte GeForce 7600 GT 256MB. CoR testing starts off the way Quake 4 ended, with the Gigabyte card in second place, just behind the GeForce 7800 GT, at both 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 resolutions.
When we shift The Chronicles of Riddick benchmark settings to 4X anti-aliasing and 8X anisotropic filtering, the Gigabyte GeForce 7600 GT 256MB card's performance does drop back, and falls behind both the GeForce 6800 Ultra and Radeon X1800 XL.
F.E.A.R. is a new entrant to our game benchmark suite, and it features jaw-dropping graphics and a physics engine that can bring any system to its knees. It even includes a wide selection of System and Video settings, along with an in-game testing module to keep things 100% comparable between different graphics cards. In this case, as we are dealing with video card performance, so we have racked the system and physics settings to high (max only increases AF and AA) and then testing at different resolutions.
F.E.A.R. is potentially the most demanding game benchmark in our entire suite, and its overall design rewards both pure performance and an SM 2.0/3.0 feature set. The Gigabyte GeForce 7600 GT 256MB card did extremely well in F.E.A.R. testing, and posted a higher score than the GeForce 6800 Ultra at both resolutions. That was as far as it would go, and the GeForce 7800 GT remained the top performer in this class.
The performance rankings change a bit when the 4X AA and 8X AF details are enabled, and the Gigabyte GeForce 7600 GT now drops behind the GeForce 6800 Ultra.
