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Performance

We'll be focusing on performance under default and 4x AA with 16x AF. After that, we'll take a quick look at transparency anti aliasing and HDR performance. We didn't test 8xS performance, since this mode of antialiasing doesn't always work well with all games in our benchmark (for example with soft shadows in SW: KOTOR). To put these scores into perspective, we've included results from both a standard clocked and a higher clocked GeForce 7800GTX (the ASUS EN7800GTX TOP), running at the same settings.

We'd like to thank both Tagan and Kingston for supplying the additional power supply and 1 GB memory modules for this article. We'd also like to thank Leadtek for providing the GeForce 7900GTX sample card.

Our test setup
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ socket 939
2 x 1024 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
Tagan TG530-U15 530 watts ATX/BTX power supply

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed
ATI Catalyst 6.2 reference driver
NVIDIA Forceware 84.21reference driver
NVIDIA NForce 4 6.66 reference driver
Creative SoundBlaster Live! 24 bit 5.12.1.512 driver.
DirectX 9.0c

The graphs are pretty self explanatory, but in case you can't see the text, they're arranged in groups of three colors: green for minimum fps, blue for average fps and red for maximum fps. The first group represent test results under default settings, and the second represent results with 4xAA and 16xAF enabled.These results are in frame rate per second.

Standard settings

The results:

If you look at the numbers, you'll see that the GeForce 7900GTX is generally slower than the GeForce 7800GTX when running without AA and AF. It's quite odd. If we were system limited, the results should be at least very close, not about 10 percent slower on the higher clocked card. We believe this is a driver problem, since other games are affected as well. It's not until we hit 1280 x 1024 and above with AA and AF do we see the GeForce 7900GTX taking a small lead. It's actually more effective than the GeForce 7800GTX, with 'only' a 40 percent frame drop compared to the 50 percent of the GeForce 7800GTX. We'll be looking at efficiency later on, but for now this looks 'interesting'.

The core clock speed difference also helps the GeForce 7900GTX maintain an 80 fps minimum in this game, whereas the GeForce 7800GTX dipped slightly below that. In real life, that means you probably be seeing 80 fps all throughout gameplay - Call of Duty is capped at 80 fps by default.

	GeForce 7800GTX		GeForce 7900GTX
	Default	4x AA 16x AF	Default	4x AA 16x AF
<30 fps	0	0	0	0
30-45 fps	0	0	0	0
45-60 fps	0	0	0	0
60-90 fps	5	35	5	5
90-120 fps	4	39	8	43
>120 fps	67	2	63	28
Total	76	76	76	76

results are in seconds

In case you're wondering, the table above is actually a brokedown of the benchmark results, displaying the time spent throughout the replay organized into several different frame rates ranges. Because this is a replay and not a timedemo, the replay runtime is the same between all cards. With a timedemo, the total number of seconds will vary according to settings, ie a heavier setting will have a higher number of seconds because the benchmarks takes longer to finish.

Now look at the 60 - 90 fps range, where we most likely will experience the minimum fps. You can see that you'll spend quite some time here with the GeForce 7800GTX, but not so with the GeForce 7900GTX. Remember, this is at 1600 x 1200. So, you'll spend most of your time above 90 fps with the GeForce 7900GTX. That's extremely fast. As you can see, the GeForce 7900GTX is only worth it if you want to play at 1600 x 1200 with AA and AF, any less you could 'make do' with the GeForce 7800GTX.

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