NVIDIA's GeForce 7800 GTX Hits The Ground Running
by Derek Wilson on June 22, 2005 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Everquest 2 Performance Performance
Despite the fact that Everquest 2 is an MMORPG, it has some of the most demanding graphics of any game to date. The extreme quality mode manages to tax the system so severely that even at 1280x1024 we aren't able to get above 25 FPS with the 7800 GTX. ATI pulls ahead of the single 6800U by over 100% in the widescreen 1920x1200 resolution, though in more reasonable settings the performance is closer. It's interesting to note that the 6800U actually outperforms the X850XTPE in the "Extreme Quality" mode.Everquest 2 does put a larger strain on the CPU than many other games, so the benefits of SLI are rather limited without enabling AA/AF. The biggest gap between a single card and SLI setup is only 22% at 1920x1200 with the 6800U cards; the 7800 SLI setup only manages a 13% margin of victory at 1600x1200. Turning on the AA/AF changes things quite a bit, however, with the SLI setups gaining 40 to 65% on the 6800U and 60 to 72% on the 7800 cards. The single 7800 competes rather well with the 6800SLI and takes the lead in most of the non-AA/AF settings, though the SLI cards win once AA/AF is enabled by 17%. The exception is once again the 2048x1536 resolution , where the 6800 cards simply can't provide acceptable frame rates with AA/AF enabled.
Enabling AA/AF causes a massive performance hit on most of the configurations, though. The single 7800 loses almost half of its performance while the 6800 configurations fare even worse in some cases. 2048 in particular causes them to run at 1/3 to 1/4 the speed that they managed without AA. It may be a driver bug, though with the graphical complexity and polygon counts of EQ2, it's difficult to lay all the blame on the drivers. ATI does a little better, but they still take a 30 to 45% performance hit by enabling AA/AF. For those of you addicted to the lifestyle known as Everquest 2, you may actually be able to stomach the cost of 7800GTX SLI.
One issue that we encountered on a few resolutions and configuration in EQ2 was a strange flickering/rendering problem. This occurred on both the 6600GT and 7800GTX SLI configurations, though it was only with AA/AF enabled and only at 2048x1536 for the 7800 SLI cards. We didn't bother running the 6600GT SLI at anything more than 1600x1200, of course, as even at that resolution the frame rates were all but unplayable.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
127 Comments
View All Comments
Diasper - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
oops posted before i wrote anything. Some of the results are impressive, others aren't at all. In fact results seem to be all over the board - I suspect drivers are something of the culprit and are to be blamed. Hopefully, as new drivers come out we'll see some performance increases or at least more a uniform distribution of good resultsDiasper - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
Live - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
Derek get cracking, the graphs are all messed up! And the Transparency AA Performance section could use some info on what game it is tested on and some more comments. I also think that each benchmark warrants some comments for all of us that have a hard time remembering two numbers at the same time. Keep it simple folks….Johnmcl7 - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
I agree something is wrong with these results, I thought they were odd but when I got to the Enemy Territory ones they seem completely wrong - at 2048x1536 and 4xAA the X850XT is apparently getting 104 fps, while the 6800 Ultra gets 48.3 and the SLI 6800 Ultras are only getting 34.6 fps! Especially bearing in mind it's an OpenGL game.John
rimshot - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
This has got to be an error by Anandtech, all other reviews show the 7800GTX in SLI at those same settings hammering the 6800Ultra in SLI.Lonyo - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
The benchmarks are all a load of crap it seems.Check the Wolfenstein benchmarks.
The X850XT goes from 74fps @ 1600x1200 w/4xAA to 103fps @ 2048x1536 w/4xAA
A 33% increase when the res gets turned up. Good one.
There also seem to be many other similar things which look like errors, but they could just be crappy nVidia drivers, or something wrong with SLI profiles.
Who knows, but there's definately a lot of things which look VERY odd/suspicious here.
Dukemaster - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
My Iiyama VMP 454 does 2048 no prob so i'm game :pvanish - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
oh and in several of the benchmarks, the 6800U SLI more than doubles the performance over the single 6800U. Is that normal? I thought SLI gains were generally about 45% or so.rimshot - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
Is it just me or is it a little strange that the 6800Ultra SLI outperforms the 7800GTX SLI at 1600x1200 with 4xAA in every benchmark ???PrinceXizor - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
No comment on the fact that in virtually every game it LOSES to the 6800 SLI at 1600x1200 at 4XAA.All other scores look very impressive. But, in this particualar group of settings, the 6800 SLI eats it for lunch.
P-X