NVIDIA's GeForce 7800 GTX Hits The Ground Running
by Derek Wilson on June 22, 2005 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Doom 3 1.3 Performance
Unlike most of the other games we're looking at, Doom 3 actually places quite a strain on the memory bandwidth of the graphics card. This seems to be the a common occurrence with many of the OpenGL games, though Doom 3 more so than others. The reason for this is the large number of stencil calculations that are required for the real time shadows. This allows the 6800U SLI setup to actually outperform a single 7800GTX by a sizeable margin - remember that the difference in memory bandwidth between a 6800U and a 7800GTX is only 9%. We also see that antialiasing has a major impact on the single 7800GTX, though it still maintains a commanding lead (25 to 81% depending on resolution and settings) over the 6800U. In the SLI configurations, the 7800GTX only leads by 15% at 1600x1200 4xAA, but that grows to 61% when we move to 2048x1536.
Switching to the ATI card, we can see that ATI has done a lot to close the performance gap in Doom 3. While the 6800U still wins in 1600x1200, the ATI card actually comes out ahead at 2048x1536. Like we've seen in a few other games, though, the NVIDIA drivers don't seem to handle 2048x1536 very well. With AA/AF enabled, the 6800U once again takes a 50% performance hit when increasing the resolution. Due to the dark atmosphere and lighting flashes, Doom 3 is a game that definitely needs to run at a high refresh rate or with VSYNC enabled, so again the lack of performance at 2048x1536 isn't the end of the world. What we're mostly concerned with is taxing the hardware to show future potential, and it's safe to say that the 7800GTX - particularly with SLI - will be able to handle all games for many years.
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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