XFX GeForce GTX 260/216 Black Edition Review :: Gaming on the XFX GeForce GTX 260 Black Edition card

Every year the major game manufacturers release new games around the holiday season. The November and December months are the heaviest times of year to see new games due to the fact that most people buy games around Christmas time and that is when shoppers buy the most. This year has seen a slew of new releases for the PC including Assassin's Creed, Crysis Warhead, and Stalker Clear Sky. In the last few weeks and next week several major games have been or will be released.

Triple AAA titles are those that game manufacturers put a lot of their effort into marketing and development money into. In the last few weeks Fallout 3, Far Cry 2, Dead Space, and Call of Duty 4 have been released. Tomorrow another game Left 4 Dead will be released. These five games are Triple A titles. So today I have decided to look at these five games on the XFX GeForce GTX 260 216 Black Edition card.

Fallout was one of the first games on the PC I really got into with the story of Vault 13 in 1997. The game was followed by Fallout 2 on the PC just a year later. The story revolves around Vault dwellers and their attempt to find objects and complete tasks. Fallout 3 plays very well on the GeForce GTX 260 216 with frame rates above 60 fps throughout even at the highest settings.

Dead Space is a game released in October for the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 game platforms. This game has the protagonist Issac Clarke against a mob of infected people called the Necromorphs. The game is similar in concept to Resident Evil but set in space. Dead Space uses a modified version of the Godfather engine and based upon DirectX 9.0 graphics. The game is an excellent counterpart to the Resident Evil series using many of the same scary moments.

Left 4 Dead is a new game being released today on the Steam network. Utilizing the Half Life 2 Engine, Left 4 Dead involves a quartet of soldiers trying to survive a zombie attack by thousands of zombies. The game uses an engine originally developed for DirectX 9.0 cards but it is still visually stunning. The XFX GeForce GTX 260 Black Edition plays this game flawlessly with no stutter even with high resolutions and AA turned on.

Call of Duty was released many years ago on the PC and Xbox. Well, actually the first COD was released in 2004 to a lot of positive reaction. This has led to four sequels that have been released annually including this year's Call of Duty 5 World at War. COD WAW is set in the Pacific Theater of Operations during World War II. The game uses DirectX 9.0 graphics but it is one of the top selling series of all time on the PC. COD WAW was entirely playable on the GeForce GTX 260 Black Edition card, with playable framerates throughout at 1920x1200 4x AA 16x AF. Far Cry was one of the first DirectX 9.0 games released on the PC in 2005. The sequel, Far Cry 2 was recently released and is considered an AAA title. This game uses DirectX 10.0 features and features a new engine called Dunia which means living. The developers said that the game used only 3% of the original CryEngine code that was used in Far Cry. This allows the game to take advantage of multi-core processors and runs much smoother on the GTX 260 than Crysis does.