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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VIAN - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
"NVIDIA sees texture bandwidth as outweighing color and z bandwidth in the not too distant future." That was a quote from the article after saying that Nvidia was focusing less on Memory Bandwidth.Do these two statements not match or is there something I'm not aware of.
obeseotron - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
These benchmarks are pretty clearly rushed out and wrong, or at least improperly attributed to the wrong hardware. SLI 6800 show up faster than SLI 7800's in many benchmarks, in some cases much more than doubling single 6800 scores. I understand NDAs suck with the limited amount of time to produce a review, but I'd rather it have not been posted until the afternoon than ignore the benchmarks section.IronChefMoto - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
#28 -- Mlittl3 can't pronounce Penske or terran properly, and he's giving out grammar advice? Sad. ;)SDA - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
QUESTIONOkay, allcaps=obnoxious. But I do have a question. How was system power consumption measured? That is, was the draw of the computer at the wall measured, or was the draw on the PSU measured? In other words, did you measure how much power the PSU drew from the wall or how much power the components drew from the PSU?
Aikouka - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
Wow, I'm simply amazed. I said to someone as soon as I saw this "Wow, now I feel bad that I just bought a 6800GT ... but at least they won't be available for 1 or 2 months." Then I look and see that retailers already have them! I was shocked to say the least.RyDogg1 - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
But my question was "who," was buying them. I'm a hardware goon as much as the next guy, but everyone knows that in 6-12 months, the next gen is out and price is lower on these. I mean the benches are presenting comparisons with cards that according to the article are close to a year old. Obviously some sucker lays down the cash because the "premium," price is way too high for a common consumer.Maybe this one of the factors that will lead to the Xbox360/PS3 becoming the new gaming standard as opposed to the Video Card market pushing the envelope.
geekfool - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
What no Crossfire benchies? I guess they didn't wany Nvidia to loose on their big launch day.Lonyo - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
The initial 6800U's cost lots because of price gouging.They were in very limited supply, so people hiked up the prices.
The MSRP of these cards is $600, and they are available.
MSRP of the 6800U's was $500, the sellers then inflated prices.
Lifted - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
#24: In the Wolfenstein graph they obviously reversed the 7800 GTX SLI with the Radeon.They only reveresed a couple of labels here and there, chill out. It's still VERY OBVIOUS which card is which just by looking at the performance!
WAKE UP SLEEPY HEADS.
mlittl3 - Wednesday, June 22, 2005 - link
Derek,I know this article must have been rushed out but it needs EXTREME proofreading. As many have said in the other comments above, the results need to be carefully gone over to get the right numbers in the right place.
There is no way that the ATI card can go from just under 75 fps at 1600x1200 to over 100 fps at 2048x1535 in Enemy Territory.
Also, the Final Words heading is part of the paragraph text instead of a bold heading above it.
There are other grammatical errors too but those aren't as important as the erroneous data. Plus, a little analysis of each of the benchmark results for each game would be nice but not necessary.
Please go over each graph and make sure the numbers are right.