At 2560x1600, the GeForce GTX 295 predictably dominated the entire pack, giving us stellar performance and a great gameplay experience. Of course, the Radeon HD 4870 X2, HD 5870, GeForce GTX 285, Radeon HD 5850, and GeForce GTX 275 gave us the same experience. They just did so at slightly a lower level of performance. In the mainstream segment, it is impossible to recommend any of the sampled video cards for use at 2560x1600. Performance was just not good enough, and the lengths we had to go to make it playable rendered the image quality subpar. Unfortunately, an apparent bug kept us from enabling 2X AA at 2560x1600 on the GeForce GTX 295, even though that video card should have been capable of it.

At 1920x1200, the GeForce GTX 285, Radeon HD 5850, and GeForce GTX 275 took great performance gains over 2560x1600. Even the GeForce GTS 250 was able to play Borderlands with maximum in-game settings at 1920x1200. Unfortunately, the Radeon HD 5770 and HD 5750 were not as lucky. We were forced to lower image quality to make up some performance, but it was not as severe as it was at 2560x1600. Still, the price and performance advantage of the GeForce GTS 250 make it an impressive contender at 1920x1200.

Going down to 1680x1050, we had no problem playing with maximum in-game settings on any of the three mainstream video cards we tested at that resolution. The least expensive video card of the three, the NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250, gave us the best performance for this game.

We saw only very small differences in CPU utilization between NVIDIA and AMD video cards. Overall, the AMD Radeon HD 5870 was more effective at balancing the CPU load across the cores of our quad-core Core i7 920 processor, but it didn’t translate into a gameplay advantage. There were larger differences in memory usage, but it was inconsistent. Sitting at the desktop, the system had more free memory with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 installed than with AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 5870 installed. But once under load, the GeForce GTX 285 consumed more memory than the Radeon HD 5870. In the end, the differences were so minor as to be inconsequential, but it is interesting to see the differences.