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Performance

Now for the performance evaluation. It's a pretty interesting round up, since we have two cards sticking to the reference specification and one with a slightly higher core clock. We pretty much expect the Galaxy Glacier to be slightly faster and of course by how much. Since we're using a quite limited system, we'll be seeing if that 20 MHz advantage translates to real world performance (especially for the minimum fps (on graphically limited scenarios).

In general, we didn't experience any problems with any of the cards (except power drain problems noted before with the Galaxy Glacier 6800GT). Installation was smooth as you can get. Before looking at the test results, we encourage you to read our 'How We Evaluate' article so you understand how we conduct our test and benchmarks. More importantly, you will also see how each benchmarks react with our test setup. We only put the average, minimum and maximum fps in this evaluation to keep it brief, excluding the per second fps progress graph.

Our test setup
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ socket 939
2 x 256 MB Kingston KVR 3-3-3 PC3200 DDR-SDRAM
MSI K8N NForce 4 SLI motherboard
Maxtor DiamondMaxPlus9 80 GBs Serial ATA 8 MB buffer
ASUS E-616 DVD-ROM
450 watts ATX power supply

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed
NVIDIA Forceware 78.01 & 66.93 reference driver
NVIDIA NForce 4 6.66 reference driver
Creative SoundBlaster Live! 24 bit 5.12.1.512 driver.
DirectX 9.0c
all respected games used for benchmarks have been updated to their latest, final builds.

The results:

While the speed advantage of the Galaxy Glacier makes it the fastest card overall in this game, we see that the Leadtek PX6800GT can still catch up to it. However, the difference is barely noticeable and we've definitely hit the fps ceiling with these cards. Only under very strenuous situations such as 1600 x 1200 with AA and AF do we see a significant performance drop.


Again, we're seeing the Galaxy Glacier achieving a higher fps - but again the difference is barely noticeable (1,5 to 2 fps). As you can see, we're barely making the 30 fps mark in this game at 1600 x 1200, 16x AF. The Beyond 3D Caspian Oil Refinery demo is very shader oriented, although it's only using DirectX 8 shaders (PS 1.1). From the looks of it, it's very doubtful we can push more than 30 fps minimum with shader laden games with a resolution of 1600 x 1200.

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