Hey im after a list of released video cards in order of performace(roughly). i am using it to 'pass' a users machine performance wise. any ideas where i can get one. i need the names that the bios returns as well, as i am using the WIM interface and the Win32_VideoController. Any ideas??

Moving you to hardware discussion.

This is an extremely bad idea. There's so many types of cards that it's completely unfeasable to get a list of them all and to check them all for performance. And what will you do when a card isn't on the list? Assume it's a new card and it'll be top of the range? Assume it's an older card and not supported?

Just check the card capabilities in D3D or OpenGL and use them, like every other application does.

You should create a representative scene, then run through it (as an intro sequence or whatnot) and time it, then pass/fail based on the performance of that scene.

The representative scene idea could work to show how quickly it will run on their video card, but it doesn't mean it looks the way it should. Unless the point of the test is to allow the user to evaluate the situation for himself. Otherwise, if you want to do it completely automatically it may not work.

For example, I can run some directx 10 examples on my video card, but some of them just show a black screen even though they may be running at a decent framerate (they probably aren't, but that's not the point). In this situation, it is necessary to check the capabilities of the card using dx or ogl like Evil Steve has suggested.

The point in the original question was to rate cards based on performance, not based on capabilities. If you need specific capabilities that are optional in your API, you need to separately test for those as well.

Your DX10 example was pretty poor, though, because DirectX 10 is designed to avoid cap bits -- ALL the features MUST work for ALL DirectX 10 cards, or they are not DirectX 10. The differentiation will only be on performance. Thus, your graphics card wouldn't work at all for DX10, or it would work fine (only the case if it's a GF8800 right now :-)