Popular games or games with great graphics for reviews?

I voted for games with great graphics because none of the choices matched up exactly with what I was thinking.

I'd like to see the games that have popular engines being utilized for benches. Quake3 or RtCW may not be very popular any longer, but there are so many games on the market that use the Q3 engine it is still nice to see how the boards hold up. Likewise, the 3DMark/MaxPayne engine appears to be the foundation for a number of upcoming games making it a good platform to test with IMO. I don't find the graphics terribly impressive in any of those, but overall they are better then the gameplay at least. It would also be very nice to see the Unreal2 engine tested if you guys could get a hold of a copy of the benchmark. I think if you focus on the latest revision of the most popular engines being used you'll find a good balance between what people play and what looks good overall.

 

Another vote for adding CS in to the mix. RTCW would probably be a better pick than Q3 these days, too. Q3 doesn't have the outdoor areas and absolutely abusive use of alpha blended effect like RTCW.

The problem is HL's demo system still kinda bites. In my experience the first run was up to 25% slower than subsequent runs, with the output only becoming consistant after the 4th or 5th run. Even then it's a bit flaky. The playback speed relies incredibly on the record speed, which is of course not conductive to getting a good demo in the first place. Just make sure the demo is recorded with vysnc off, fps_max X, 512x384, and on a ridiculously powerful (CPU) machine. fps_max x (where X is the framerate cap) is useful so the record doesn't speed up and slow down according to the speed of the host record machine. Set it to the minimum framerate the host machine can handle, perhaps 40-60.