So What Sort of Review is Useful?

To be absolutely honest, it depends on what your priorities and considerations are when you're looking to purchase a brand new latest-and-greatest video card.

As mentioned, if you're the type that always upgrade once every year or every 18 months and you already need a new video card now, then the majority of the current crop of reviews will matter a lot to you because these reviews will feature benchmarks of a host of games that are available and of which you are tempted to buy and play. What you're likely to focus on is how certain video cards perform in a variety of games with anti-aliasing (AA) and/or anisotropic filtering (AF) applied at various resolutions. AA and AF are termed "out of the box" features, things that you can choose to apply on almost every game you own or intend to own, unlike advanced shader effects that you have no control over. Beyond3D reviews have always included games as part of their benchmark suite. While we always try to include most of the popular games currently available, we try to use those that feature built-in benchmarking facilities whenever possible since this tends to avoid any inconsistencies in results across various platforms and hardware. We do not think that including a wide list of games in reviews will ever achieve the generally accepted ambitions of such endeavours (to cater to as many types of gamers as possible) since this is impossible. A smallish but good mix of games that can be both popular and forward-looking (in terms of technologies) that are already out should suffice without boredom setting in for readers.