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Performance

We ran our benchmarks with our usual test settings.  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.

Unfortunately, we botched up the test results of GTR2. We had used different quality settings for the Leadtek PX8800GTS than the rest of the cards, so we will omit results from GTR2 in this round up. 

We'd like to thank Tagan for supplying the additional power supply and Gigabyte for supplying the Gigabyte P965-DS3P for this article. 

Our test setup
Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 socket LGA-775 (running at 7 x 400 MHz)
4 x 512 MB A-DATA 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
NVIDIA Forceware 158.19 BETA reference driver
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:

Interesting to note that the modest overclock on teh MSI NX8800GTS OC Edition does offer noticeable differences with AA and AF at 1024 x 768. - minimum fps are higher by 6 fps or 10 percent. It would seem the double pump shader units of the GeForce 8800GTS will provide great benefits with just small core clock increase. However, that 10 percent is not enough for the card to supply high enough frame rates at 1600 x 1200 with AA and AF enabled.

Performance wise, the other reference clocked cards are about the same - the ASUS EN8800GTS and Gigabyte NX8800GTS. Quite odd is the performance we're getting from the Leadtek PX8800GTS TDH. It is noticeably slower than the other cards, despite running at the same clock and using the same driver and game settings. Did we botched up these results as well? We didn't think so since the other benchmarks don't show the same.

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