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Performance

Graphical settings for these games are set to their highest possible values. Notable differences are F.E.A.R where we disable "Soft Shadows", Quake 4 where we use High Quality - not Ultra Quality - but anisotropic filtering was set to "1" for default tests and "16" for AA / AF tests. We used Serious Sam II built in "Maximum" quality preset then change resolution and AA / AF settings accordingly. All of these settings can be seen here. Our TES IV: Oblivion settings are as close as we can get to Ultra High Quality - you can see our test settings here. For Need for Speed: Carbon, we used the game's "Maximum" video quality preset, but change the filtering to "Trilinear" for default tests - AA AF tests are run with "4x" and "Anistropic". NFS: Carbon test were done with the Sprint Race on Lincoln Boulevard. You can see the settings we used for GTR 2 here. Clear weather was used for our run of Monza GP tests.

We'd like to thank Tagan for supplying the additional power supply and Gigabyte for supplying both the Gigabyte P965-DS3P and Radeon X1950 Pro for this article. And of course, thanks to ASUS for lending us their EN8800GTS 640 MB and EN7950GT also to Leadtek for the PX8800GTS-TDH 320 MB. Please keep in mind that the GeForce 7950GT and Radeon X1950 Pro are not direct competitors to the GeForce 8800GTS. Their results are displayed merely as a reference point.

Our test setup
Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 socket LGA-775 (running at 7 x 400 MHz)
4 x 512 MB A-DATA Vitesta 5-5-5-18 PC6400 DDR2-SDRAM
Gigabyte P965-DS3P Intel P965 motherboard
Maxtor DiamondMaxPlus9 80 GBs Serial ATA 8 MB buffer
LiteOn 1673S DVD-RW
Tagan TG530-U15 530 watts ATX/BTX power supply

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed
ATI Catalyst 7.3 reference driver
NVIDIA Forceware 93.71 reference driver (for the GeForce 7950GT)
NVIDIA Forceware 158.19 BETA reference driver (for the GeForce 8800GTS 640 MB and 320 MB)
Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility 8.1.0.1006
DirectX 9.0c
all respected games used for benchmarks have been updated to their latest,final builds.

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 of graphs are results taken with default settings - AA and AF is not enabled. The second group of results are results with 4x AA and 16x AF.

The results:

Of course, the GeForce 8800GTS 640 and 320 MB, with more shader processing power than the Radeon X1950 Pro and GeForce 7950GT were able to offer higher minimum and average frame rates. Those of you who are finicky with minimum frame rates, like we do, should probably stick with the GeForce 8800GTS 640 MB. The card consistently offer higher minimum frame rates throughout the benchmark at 1024 x 768 and 1280 x 960 with AA and AF. At 1280 x 960 with AA and AF enabled, you can expect 46 to 50 percent higher frame rates overall, but only the GeForce 8800GTS 640 MB can offer 50 percent higher minimum fps compared to the GeForce 7950GT.

You may think the GeForce 8800GTS 640 MB still has high enough frame rates at 1600 x 1200 with AA / AF enabled, but we really don't recommend the card for that high a resolution. You'll want to have minimum frame rates no lower than 35 to 40 fps if you want to enjoy a real fluid gameplay experience in FEAR. In that respect, while both GeForce 8800GTS are faster than the Radeon X1950 Pro and GeForce 7950GT, we still think it's mainly still a card built for 1280 x 1024 or in this case 1280 x 960 with AA and AF enabled, at least with this game. So, there's actually very little going for it if you already using the GeForce 7950GT. It offers just about the same minimum fps, though it has slightly lower average fps.

The GeForce 8800GTS is definitely fast, however we can still see the penalty for AA is still pretty high. About 40 percent if you look at the results with and without AA and AF at 1600 x 1200.


Usually, we have our fps progress graph where we look at how frame rates progress through the whole benchmark on each card. We opt no to do that today but rather see how much penalty we can expect when we push both GeForce 8800GTS card with higher modes of anti aliasing - 8xQ, 8x CSAA, 16xQ and 16x CSAA.

The trend seems constant - 8xQ with 8 color / Z / stencil samples is 'heavier' than 8x CSAA with just 4 color / Z / stencil samples. The good news is that there seem to be little performance difference between 8x and 16x CSAA. So, which modes are fast enough for fluid gameplay? Seeing we want at least 35 to 40 minimum fps, we recommend using 1024 x 768 with all these modes (except for 4x MSAA). Minimum frame rates seem to fluctuate between 30 to 35 fps at 1280 x 960 with the GeForce 8800GTS 640 MB and lower with the 320 MB version.

One more thing to note is that the added memory capacity of the GeForce 8800GTS 640 MB seems to have a positive effect on performance, even more so if you plan to use anti aliasing modes higher than 4x MSAA. The card is generally faster than its 320 MB sibling. Of course, we'll have to look at other benchmarks just to be sure.

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