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Performance

Most of the cards here except for the ASUS EN7900GS are running at a slightly higher clocks. The Gigabyte GeForce 7900GS TurboForce and  PX7900GS Extreme core and memory clocks are not that much different - 522 / 720 MHz for the Gigabyte GeForce 7900GS TurboForce and 520 / 700 MHz Leadtek PX7900GS TDH Extreme, respectively. We expect the higher clocked cards to offer slightly higher frame rates than reference clocked cards. 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. Need For Speed: Most Wanted was set to to maximum quality, except for Reflection Update Rate, which was set to its minimum value. For The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, we used our usual settings, where we basically put every slider and detail to its maximum settings except for Tree and AI Distance. Self Shadows and Shadows on Grass are disabled. This setting is actually pretty close to Bethesda's Ultra Quality settings, which is the default setting for (most) high end cards (but without HDR to allow AA performance testing).

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:

With slightly higher clocked core and memory, both the Gigabyte GeForce 7900GS TurboForce and Leadtek PX7900GS TDH Extreme are faster than the reference clocked ASUS EN7900GS. The difference may not be very noticeable, but its there. However, both cards are still no match for the GeForce 7950GT. Not surprising, since the GeForce 7950GT is not only using a higher core and memory clock, but comes with more vertex and pixel units as well.

All the GeForce 7900GS cards do put up respectable numbers in F.E.A.R at close to maximum settings (without soft shadows), particularly without AA and AF. Both higher clocked cards put up minimum frame rates slightly above 30 fps at 1600 x 1200, while the slower ASUS EN7900GS is a single frame below 30 fps. Of course, those frame rates may change for the worse in actual gameplay, which will get into later.

Frame rates  above 1024 x 768 with AA and AF are certainly not high enough for comfortable gameplay - in our experience you'll want to have more than 35 fps minimum in F.E.A.R. This is expected, since these cards are really mainstream cards or performance class cards according to vendors. You'll need enthusiast level cards like the GeForce 7900GTX or equivalent if you want to play at higher resolutions with AA and AF enabled. Or you can pair two of these cards in SLI, which we'll get into later. The ASUS EN7900GS takes the last  position, the Gigabyte GeForce 7900GS and Leadtek PX7900GS TDH Extreme edging each other in the middle and the GeForce 7950GT comes in first. No doubt you'll notice the frame rate between these cards are not that different - 3 fps is less than 10 percent at 1024 x 768 with AA and AF though we see slightly higher differences in average frame rates (most likely from the higher frame rates on less graphically intensive parts of the test.

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