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Performance

Most of the cards here except for the MSI NX7900GT are running at a slightly higher clock than reference specification. In fact, the three other cards - ASUS EN7900GT TOP, Gigabyte GeForce 7900GT TurboForce and Leadtek PX7900GT Extreme are basically using the same core and memory clock - about 520 and 720 MHz, respectively. Like our last GeForce 7600GT round up, we expect the higher clocked cards to offer slightly higher frame rates. It will be interesting to see just by how much.

As usual, we'll be focusing on performance under default settings and with 4x AA and 16x AF. Anti aliasing and anisotropic filtering are applied from the in-game menu settings (or console) whenever possible. V-sync was disabled on both the driver panel and within the game, if present. The settings we used for each game are pretty much the same as our usual test settings. F.E.A.R was set to the maximum quality (for both graphics and computer settings) but without Soft Shadows to allow performance testing with AA. Quake 4 was set to 'High Quality' while for Serious Sam II we used the 'Maximum' video options preset but with custom resolutions, AA and AF settings. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory was set to use its SM 3.0 rendering path with the highest detail (sans HDR).

We'd like to thank Tagan for supplying the additional power supply for this article.

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
NVIDIA Forceware 84.21 reference 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.

The results:

Without AA and AF, the reference clocked MSI NX7900GT was able to keep up with the rest of the pack at 1024 x 768, no doubt because we're system limited at that resolution. Obviously at higher resolutions, it slightly falls behind by about 10 fps or 5 percent. With AA and AF enabled, the difference shows up rather quickly - the NX7900GT is slightly slower than the other three higher clocked cards even at 1024 x 768. The difference stays pretty much the same at higher resolutions, something like 10 percent. However, notice that at 1600 x 1200, even the higher clocked ASUS EN7900GT TOP, Leadtek PX7900GT Extreme and Gigabyte GeForce 7900GT TurboForce is beginning to buck under the pressure - minimum frame rates are slightly slower than without AA and AF.

In all honesty, while the NX7900GT may seem 'slower', it still performs admirably despite it's clock disadvantage. Looking closely at the 1280 x 1024 results, the card was still able to maintain the same level of minimum frame rate with and without AA and AF. So, the higher average frame rates from the other cards are mostly seen on less graphically intensive parts of the benchmark. The difference in performance is more 'noticeable' at 1600 x 1200, but all the cards experienced quite a big hit at this point. A 5 percent difference is not a strong enough argument to buy these higher clocked cards. Let's see what we can gleam out of the other benchmarks.

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