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Fall '06 NVIDIA GPU Refresh - Part I: GeForce 7900 GS

 by Derek Wilson on September 6, 2006 9:00 AM EST
29 Comments | Add A Comment
29 Comments

F.E.A.R. Performance

F.E.A.R. has a built in test that we make use of in this performance analysis. This test flies through some action as people shoot each other and things blow up. F.E.A.R. is very heavy on the graphics, and we enable most of the high end settings for our test.

During our testing of F.E.A.R., we noted that the "soft shadows" don't really look soft. They jumped out at us as multiple layers of transparent shadows layered on top of each other and jittered to appear soft. Unfortunately, this costs a lot in performance and not nearly enough shadows are used to make this look realistic. Thus, we disable soft shadows in our test even though its one of the large performance drains on the system.

Again we tested with anisotropic filtering at 8x, and all options were on their highest quality (with the exception of soft shadows which was disabled). Frame rates for F.E.A.R. can get pretty low for a first person shooter, but the game does a good job of staying playable down to about 25 fps.

F.E.A.R. Performance

The X1900 GT maintains an advantage through out this DirectX 9 based title. While the overclocked XFX M480 7900 GS is able to just catch up at 1920x1440, the cost savings and promise of SLI of the NVIDIA based cards are only enough to call this a toss up in the value category.

F.E.A.R. - No AA
 
800x600
1024x768
1280x1024
1600x1200
1920x1440
ATI Radeon X800 GTO
77
52
36
24
15
ATI Radeon X1600 XT
76
53
37
26
17
ATI Radeon X1800 GTO
108
75
52
36
23
ATI Radeon X1900 GT
137
104
77
54
38
ATI Radeon X1900 XT 256MB
156
127
100
72
52
ATI Radeon X1900 XT
169
135
104
76
56
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT
64
46
33
23
12
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GS
84
61
43
31
17
NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT
108
78
56
39
28
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT
122
88
63
44
33
NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GS
126
92
68
48
36
XFX GeForce 7900 GS 480M Extreme
132
98
71
50
38
NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT
143
105
77
54
40

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Performance Half Life 2 Episode One Performance
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  • phusg - Tuesday, September 12, 2006 - link

    Hi Derek,

    I'm a little late to the ball but still

    > cheaper price tag

    really grates me! I know it's pretty endemic but it's still logically incorrect. A price tag can be lower of higher, but not cheaper, unless it's the price tag being sold. It's the product itself that can be cheaper.

    Cheers Derek and don't let me catch you making this one again or there'll be hell to pay ;-)

    Pete

  • imaheadcase - Thursday, September 7, 2006 - link

    Could you post a link to the bf2 demo you use, so we can compare are systems video cards to new ones?

  • Stele - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link

    At first glance, it seems that ATI has markedly improved their OpenGL implementation, at least for the Doom 3 engine:
    quote:
    ...the latest ATI OpenGL enhancements that have drastically improved Doom 3 engine based game performance.

    quote:
    ...clench Quake 4 as a benchmark that greatly favors ATI hardware when running at the highest possible quality settings. This is the exact opposite of what we have been saying about Quake 4 performance ever since the game launched....

    However, after a moment's thought considering the vast difference in performance from before, and also the following qualifiers:
    quote:
    Of course, not all OpenGL games faired well with the latest round of drivers from ATI, with City of Heros/Villains performing very poorly in spite of its use of OpenGL.

    quote:
    ...but it seems ATI has finally solved their OpenGL performance issues -- at least with this particular engine.

    one can't help but wonder - just wonder - if there's anything here that smells like the last quake.exe driver optimisation trick ... which, curiously enough, was also pulled by ATi (iirc it was during the Radeon 8500's time?). I wonder!

  • Ryan Smith - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link

    There's no quackery as far as we know of. The problems with City of Heroes is a shader corruption bug, and a bug related to rendering on a secondary buffer, according to Cryptic(the developers of CoH). Whatever ATI did to speed up OpenGL performance here, they apparently didn't take in to account CoH.

  • Stele - Thursday, September 7, 2006 - link

    Excellent! Am deciding between the X1900GT and 7900GS (when the latter shows up in the channels), and this improvement would help strengthen the case for the X1900 a bit. :)

  • S3anister - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link

    found an XFX version on this card on newegg for 189MIR.

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82...">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82...

  • emilyek - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link

    A worthless sku. x1900gt and x1800xt/gto2 are better and almost $50 cheaper.

  • sharkdude - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link

    The Oblivion percentages are the same in this graph as in the graph on page 4 for all resolutions when in fact only the 800x600 numbers should be the same. On page 5 the numbers should be 4.1%, 10.1%, 6.4%, and 7.3% for 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024, and 1600x1200. Note the text below the chart should also change 15% to 10%.

  • DerekWilson - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link

    corrected -- but your number for 16x12 appears to be wrong as well. :-)

  • Lifted - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link

    Thanks for including the 6600 and 6800 cards in the benchmarks.
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