Quote Originally Posted by SKYMTL View Post
I agree to a certain extent but let me step out of my reviewer's shoes for a second here and take a personal approach to this.

I don't count myself as a "gamer" by any stretch of the imagination since I still play the original Homeworld quite often due to the fact it is...well...fun. New games don't really hold much sway for me due to the simple fact that many have the "been there, seen that" feel to them. The newer games I usually play through once to find a suitable benchmarkable area and then let the collect dust between reviews.

However, some of these "Top 5" games have actually held my attention for longer than usual. I find myself playing Fallout 3, CoD: WaW, L4D and even Dead Space more than I normally would. Why? Because they are actually pretty decent games.

Just because Nvidia chose to put their name all over their performance numbers doesn't diminish the fact that the are all quite popular. Indeed, even if these weren't part of Nvidia's "list", I would still probably be including them in the reviews for the sole reason of their popularity and pure enjoyment.

On the flip side of things, assuming a reviewer will go out of his way to try to find some games which perform better on ATI hardware is expecting the impossible. Sure, Clear Sky and X4 seem to benefit ATI but other than that, Nvidia seems to have a choke hold on most newly released and upcoming games. This means that reviews will naturally slant towards Nvidia when games are first released. That doesn't make the p/reviews biased in any way, shape or form; it tells the actual story of Nvidia working directly with developers while ATI needs to go through one or two driver revisions before they get performance nailed down in some popular games. That is the reality of the situation and it would be dishonest for the reviewers to not tell the story as we see it.
Sure they give out some info of the games people are playing and what kind of performance should be expected in those games, it still is a list picked by Nvidia, and the rest of the games shall not be used for testing. This sure is an Nvidia PR thing to let people to do previews, and as such, should not be used as a final judgement of a product.

But yeah, inital results look good, rumoured prices look good and hopefully availibility will be good aswell. Though, niche card for niche market. As such, I am not really interested.