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.
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BenSkywalker - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
Derek-I wanted to offer my utmost thanks for the inclusion of 2048x1536 numbers. As one of the fairly sizeable group of owners of a 2070/2141 these numbers are enormously appreciated. As everyone can see 1600x1200x4x16 really doesn't give you an idea of what high resolution performance will be like. As far as the benches getting a bit messed up- it happens. You moved quickly to rectify the situation and all is well now. Thanks again for taking the time to show us how these parts perform at real high end settings.
blckgrffn - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
You're forgiven, by me anyway :) It is also the great editorial staff that makes Anandtech my homepage on every browser on all of my boxes!Nat
yacoub - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
#72 - Totally agree. Some Rome: Total War benchs are much needed - but primarily to see how the game's battle performance with large numbers of troops varies between AMD and Intel more so than NVidia and ATi, considering the game is highly CPU-limited currently in my understanding.DerekWilson - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
Hi everyone,Thank you for your comments and feedback.
I would like to personally apologize for the issues that we had with our benchmarks today. It wasn't just one link in the chain that caused the problems we had, but there were many factors that lead to the results we had here today.
For those who would like an explanation of what happened to cause certain benchmark numbers not to reflect reality, we offer you the following. Some of our SLI testing was done forcing multi-GPU rendering on for tests where there was no profile. In these cases, the default mutli-GPU mode caused a performance hit rather than the increase we are used to seeing. The issue was especially bad in Guild Wars and the SLI numbers have been removed from offending graphs. Also, on one or two titles our ATI display settings were improperly configured. Our windows monitor properties, ATI "Display" tab properties, and refresh rate override settings were mismatched. This caused the card to render. Rather than push the display at a the pixel clock we expected, ATI defaulted to a "safe" mode where the game is run at the resolution requested, but only part of the display is output to the screen. This resulted in abnormally high numbers in some cases at resolutions above 1600x1200.
For those of you who don't care about why the numbers ran the way they did, please understand we are NOT trying to hide behind our explanation as an excuse.
We agree completely that the more important issue is not why bad numbers popped up, but that bad numbers made it into a live article. For this I can only offer my sincerest of apologies. We consider it our utmost responsibility to produce quality work on which people may rely with confidence.
I am proud that our readership demands a quality above and beyond the norm, and I hope that that never changes. Everything in our power will be done to assure that events like this will not happen again.
Again, I do apologize for the erroneous benchmark results that went live this morning. And thank you for requiring that we maintain the utmost integrity.
Thanks,
Derek Wilson
Senior CPU & Graphics Editor
AnandTech.com
Dmitheon - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
I have to say, while I'm am extremely pleased with nVidia doing a real launch, the product leaves me scratching my head. They priced themselves into an extremely small market, and effectively made their 6800 series the second tier performance cards without really dropping the price on them. I'm not going to get one, but I do wonder how this will affect the company's bottom line.OrSin - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
I not tring to be a buthole but can we get a benchmark thats a RTS game. I see 10+ games benchmarks and most are FPS, the few that are not might as well be. Those RPG seems to use a silimar type engine.stmok - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
To CtK's question : Nope, SLI doesn't work with dual-display. (Last I checked, Nvidia got 2D working, but NO 3D)...Rumours say its a driver issue, and Nvidia is working on it.I don't know any more than that. I think I'd rather wait until Nvidia are actually demonstrating SLI with dual or more displays, before I lay down any money.
yacoub - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
#60 - it's already to the point where it's turning people off to PC gaming, thus damaging the company's own market of buyers. It's just going to move more people to consoles, because even though PC games are often better games and much more customizable and editable, that only means so much and the trade-off versus price to play starts to become too imbalanced to ignore.jojo4u - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
What was regarding the AF setting? I understand that it was set to 8x when AA was set to 4x?Rand - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
I have to say I'm rather disappointed in the quality of the article. A number of apparently nonsensical benchmark results, with little to no analysis of most of the results.A complete lack of any low level theoretical performance results, no attempts to measure any improvements in efficiency of what may have caused such improvements.
Temporal AA is only tested on one game with image quality examined in only one scene. Given how dramatically different games and genres utilize alpha textures your providing us with an awfully limited perspective of it's impact.