Power Within Reach: NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB
by Derek Wilson on February 12, 2007 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Quake 4 Performance
This is the only OpenGL title on our list, which is much of the reason we keep using this benchmark. Based on id Software's Doom 3 engine, Quake 4 creates an intense atmosphere through the use of excellent lighting and shadows. Ultra Mode is used, enabling uncompressed texture and normal maps, which has a large impact on the memory subsystem of the graphics card. Our test is a timedemo based on a recording of the first minute of play in the game. The 1.3 patch has been applied, and SMP support has been enabled.
It seems that enabling Ultra Mode in Quake 4 has a huge impact on the 8800 GTS 320MB. Using uncompressed data eats up memory very quickly, and this causes problems for the memory limited card. This time, the score of the 8800 GTS 320MB matches up with the two other lower memory parts we tested, but it is difficult to tell whether this is a Quake 4 issue or a hardware/driver issue.
Interestingly, performance on the 8800 GTS 320MB doesn't fall as much moving from no AA to 4xAA as it has under other games. In spite of this, most of the cards are still faster than the new GTS with 4xAA enabled. Resolution scaling under 4xAA is similar between most of the cards, but unfortunately we were unable to test AA at 2560x1600, as we had some stability issues with Quake 4 at that resolution with Ultra Mode enabled.
This is the only OpenGL title on our list, which is much of the reason we keep using this benchmark. Based on id Software's Doom 3 engine, Quake 4 creates an intense atmosphere through the use of excellent lighting and shadows. Ultra Mode is used, enabling uncompressed texture and normal maps, which has a large impact on the memory subsystem of the graphics card. Our test is a timedemo based on a recording of the first minute of play in the game. The 1.3 patch has been applied, and SMP support has been enabled.
It seems that enabling Ultra Mode in Quake 4 has a huge impact on the 8800 GTS 320MB. Using uncompressed data eats up memory very quickly, and this causes problems for the memory limited card. This time, the score of the 8800 GTS 320MB matches up with the two other lower memory parts we tested, but it is difficult to tell whether this is a Quake 4 issue or a hardware/driver issue.
Interestingly, performance on the 8800 GTS 320MB doesn't fall as much moving from no AA to 4xAA as it has under other games. In spite of this, most of the cards are still faster than the new GTS with 4xAA enabled. Resolution scaling under 4xAA is similar between most of the cards, but unfortunately we were unable to test AA at 2560x1600, as we had some stability issues with Quake 4 at that resolution with Ultra Mode enabled.
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tacoburrito - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
With all the eye candy turned on, the 320mb card seems to be only on par with the previous gen 79xx cards, but costs almost twice as much. I'd much rather cough up the extra $200 and get the full GTS version.DerekWilson - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
Actually, the 320MB card blows away the 7 series in our tests. Why would you say that it's only on par? At 16x12, the 8800 GTS 320MB is 60% faster, and the difference in performance only gets larger from there.tacoburrito - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
With the exception of Half Life 2, at 4x AA, wouldn't you say that the 8800 GTS 320 is only marginally better than 7950 GT, but would costs twice a much?tacoburrito - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
Whoops, I meant to say 7900 GTXDerekWilson - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
From the context of the thread, I assumed you were talking about Oblivion.Without AA, the 8800 320MB is much better than the 7900 GTX. With AA, there is an argument to be made, but the price of the 7900 GTX (as Jarred pointed out) is higher.
JarredWalton - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
I'd be very curious to find out where you're seeing 7900 GTX cards for "half the price". I don't see any in stock when taking a quick look at major resellers, and our http://labs.anandtech.com/products.php?sfilter=462">Pricing Engine confirms that. I'm pretty sure the 7900 GTX is discontinued now, and prices never got below $400.Wwhat - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
It still remains to be seen how DX10 games (or future OpenGL games that use geometry shaders?) run on the various incarnations of the new cards, you should have put that in the conclusion as a caveat, it's not just textures anymore you know.I don't thinks there's anything at all currently that uses geometry shaders, you wonder why some developer doesn't throw together a quick test utility, billions of people on the planet and nobody can do that little effort? geez.
Surely someone at crytek or Id or something can write a small looping thing with a framecounter? anand should send out some mails, get someone on his feet.
DerekWilson - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
There are some dx10 sample apps that make use of geometry shaders ... I've been working on testing these, but it is more difficult than it may seem as FRAPS has trouble with DX10 apps.You do have a point though -- DX10 performance will be important. The problem is that we can't really make a recommendation based on DX10 performance.
The 8 series parts do have more value than the 7 series and x1k series parts in that they support DX10. But this is as far as we can take it. Performance in the games we have does matter, and it is much more prudent to make a purchase only based on the information we know.
Sure, if the cost and performance of an 8 series part is the same or very near some DX9 class hardware, the features and DX10 support are there to recommend it over the competition. But it's hard to really use this information in any other capacity without knowing how good their DX10 support really is.
Awax - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
The main point for me is the low impact of memory size on modern games.On previous generation game, like Quake4, developers had to use a lot of high resolution texture/bump map/lookup map to achieve advanced effect with the limited capacity in raw performances and flexibility of the cards available.
With DX9 and more in DX10, the new way is to _CALCULATE_ things completely instead of having them interpolated with tricks using intermediary results or already computed lookup tables stored in textures.
DerekWilson - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
But new ways to calculate things will also benefit from having huge amounts of data to calculate things from.It's really hard to speculate on the direction DX10 games will take at this point. Certianly we will see more use of programmable features and a heavier impact on processing power. But memory usage will also increase. We'll just have to wait and see what happens.