Power Within Reach: NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB
by Derek Wilson on February 12, 2007 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
F.E.A.R. Performance
There is a built in performance test in F.E.A.R. that provides some useful statistics including average framerate. We use this performance test with all the options turned all the way up except for Soft Shadows. We disable Soft Shadows because it incurs a very high performance penalty while not delivering a good quality effect. Here we are using the 1.08 patch.
The 320MB 8800 GTS is easily able to keep up with the 640MB version under F.E.A.R. without 4xAA enabled. Performing identically at 1920x1200 shows that memory size doesn't make a difference here. Of course, as we've seen with other games, AA does increase memory usage and performance in a big way on the smaller memory part.
The two GTS parts scale similarly here, but the 320MB part performs much worse even at 1600x1200. Only our 8800 GTX is really playable at 2560x1600, but at least the 8800 GTS 320MB makes the grade at 1920x1200. Coming in with a playable score on a fairly widely used resolution is good news to majority of gamers who don't own 30" monitors.
There is a built in performance test in F.E.A.R. that provides some useful statistics including average framerate. We use this performance test with all the options turned all the way up except for Soft Shadows. We disable Soft Shadows because it incurs a very high performance penalty while not delivering a good quality effect. Here we are using the 1.08 patch.
The 320MB 8800 GTS is easily able to keep up with the 640MB version under F.E.A.R. without 4xAA enabled. Performing identically at 1920x1200 shows that memory size doesn't make a difference here. Of course, as we've seen with other games, AA does increase memory usage and performance in a big way on the smaller memory part.
The two GTS parts scale similarly here, but the 320MB part performs much worse even at 1600x1200. Only our 8800 GTX is really playable at 2560x1600, but at least the 8800 GTS 320MB makes the grade at 1920x1200. Coming in with a playable score on a fairly widely used resolution is good news to majority of gamers who don't own 30" monitors.
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nicolasb - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
The conclusion to this article:This conclusion does not seem to bear much resemblance to the actual observations. In virtually every case the card performed well without AA, but dismally as soon as 4xAA was switched on. A fair conclusion would be to recommend the card for resolutions up to 1920x1200 without AA, but definitely not with.
DerekWilson - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
The GTS 320MB still performs well if taken on its own at 19x12 with 4xAA ... But I will modify the comment to better reflect what I mean.nicolasb - Tuesday, February 13, 2007 - link
The way the conclusion now reads is a big improvement, IMNSHO. :-)munky - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
I was expecting better performance with AA enabled, and the article just glossed over the fact that the in half the games with AA the card performed on par or worse than last gen card that cost less.Bob Markinson - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
For the base Oblivion install, yes, it's not so much of a memory hog. In-game texture use usually doesn't exceed 256 MB with HDR and 4xAA on @ 1152x864. (Also, please test AA perf too with HDR, both ATI and Nvidia do support it on their current gen cards at the same time.)Most popular texture mods will bring up the memory usage north of 500 MB. I've seen it hit over 700 MB. Thus, there's a good chance that any 256 MB card would be crippled with texture swapping. I should know, mine is.
Bob Markinson - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
For the base Oblivion install, yes, it's not so much of a memory hog. In-game texture use usually doesn't exceed 256 MB with HDR and 4xAA on @ 1152x864. (Also, please test AA perf too with HDR, both ATI and Nvidia do support it on their current gen cards at the same time.)Most popular texture mods will bring up the memory usage north of 500 MB. I've seen it hit over 700 MB. Thus, there's a good chance that any 256 MB card would be crippled with texture swapping. I should know, mine is.
DerekWilson - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
What texture mod would you recommend we test with?Bob Markinson - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
Qarl's Texture Pack 2 and 3 are quite popular world texture packs. Please check this site for more details:http://devnull.devakm.googlepages.com/totoworld">http://devnull.devakm.googlepages.com/totoworld
Note that version 3 really does need a lot of texture memory. Also, check out Qarl's 4096 compressed landscape LOD normal map texture pack, it'll add far more depth than the plain, overly filtered Oblivion LOD textures.
DerekWilson - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
We will take a look at those texture packs and do some testing ...Hopefully we can provide a follow up further exploring the impact of memory on the 8800 architecture.
blackbrrd - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
I looked at the Oblivion scores, and the first thing that hit me was: they are using the standard crappy looking textures!No oblivion fan running a 8800gts would run with the standard texture pack. It is, at times, really really bad.
Running a texture pack like the one above is quite normal. If you have enough video card memory there isn't much of a slowdown - except when the data is loaded into memory - which happends all the time... It does make the game look nicer though!