NVIDIA's GeForce 7800 GTX Hits The Ground Running

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.