nV News take a look at the MSI NX7300GS, a budget-oriented graphics card.

To give it a run-through, I tested the NX7300GS using 3DMark05, which scored 2191 3DMarks, the Counter-Strike: Source stress test, Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle Earth 2 and Guild Wars. The games were tested at 1024x768 and 1280x1024 (1280x960 for BFME2) with two settings - one with all settings on low with 0xAA and 0xAF and again with all settings as high as possible with 4xAA and 16xAF. Vsync was off in all cases. The results were shocking, to me at least, but in a positive way.

In the case of LOTR BFME2, the game is capped at 30fps, so the frame rate recorded by FRAPS never went higher. Even when there were over a hundred units on screen with rushing water and all the particle effects, the impact was hardly noticeable - even on the highest settings. Now, playing against an easy enemy, the battles never got as epic as they would against a hard enemy. In those games, the performance of the SLI GeForce 6800GT's was strained, so there is no doubt the NX7300GS would have been strangled. But this shows just how well it can keep up in one of today's most graphically demanding games without any problems at all.