Fall '06 NVIDIA GPU Refresh - Part II: GeForce 7950 GT and SLI
by Derek Wilson on September 14, 2006 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Black & White 2 Performance
The AnandTech benchmark for Black & White 2 is a FRAPS benchmark. Between the very first tutorial land and the second land there is a pretty well rounded cut scene rendered in-game. This benchmark is indicative of real world performance in Black & White 2. We are able to see many of the commonly rendered objects in action. The most stressful part of the benchmark is a scene where hundreds of soldiers come running over a hill, which really pounds the geometry capabilities of these cards. At launch, ATI cards were severely outmatched when it came to B&W2 performance because of this scene, but two patches applied to the game and quite a few Catalyst revisions later give ATI cards a much needed boost in performance over what we first saw.
A desirable average framerate for Black & White 2 is anything over 20 fps. The game does remain playable down to the 17-19 fps range, but we usually start seeing the occasional annoying hiccup during gameplay here. While this isn't always a problem as far as getting things done and playing the game, any jerkiness in frame rate degrades the overall experience.
We did test with all the options on the highest quality settings under the custom menu. Antialiasing has quite a high performance hit in this game, and is generally not worth it at high resolutions unless the game is running on a super powerhouse of a graphics card. If you're the kind of person who just must have AA enabled, you'll have to settle for a little bit lower resolution than we tend to like on reasonably priced graphics cards. Black & White 2 is almost not worth playing at low resolutions without AA, depth of field, or bloom enabled. At that point, we tend to get image quality that resembles the original Black & White. While various people believe that the original was a better game, no one doubts the superiority of B&W2's amazing graphics.
At 1600x1200, the 7950 GT performs very similarly to the 512MB (and more expensive) X1900 XT. While even the 7900 GS is playable here, framerates on the level of the 7950 GT begin to allow the gamer to experiment with AA in the game.
Not much changes with resolution with respect to the 7950 GT. The performance gap between the 7950 GT and X1900 XT does narrow somewhat with increasing resolution, but the two are basically tied in performance. The 7900 GTX SLI becomes CPU limited at 1280x1024, so anything more than 7950 GT SLI is not necessary without a higher resolution or antialiasing. In general, NVIDIA cards seem to scale very slightly better than ATI under Black & White 2 at the tested resolutions and settings.
The AnandTech benchmark for Black & White 2 is a FRAPS benchmark. Between the very first tutorial land and the second land there is a pretty well rounded cut scene rendered in-game. This benchmark is indicative of real world performance in Black & White 2. We are able to see many of the commonly rendered objects in action. The most stressful part of the benchmark is a scene where hundreds of soldiers come running over a hill, which really pounds the geometry capabilities of these cards. At launch, ATI cards were severely outmatched when it came to B&W2 performance because of this scene, but two patches applied to the game and quite a few Catalyst revisions later give ATI cards a much needed boost in performance over what we first saw.
A desirable average framerate for Black & White 2 is anything over 20 fps. The game does remain playable down to the 17-19 fps range, but we usually start seeing the occasional annoying hiccup during gameplay here. While this isn't always a problem as far as getting things done and playing the game, any jerkiness in frame rate degrades the overall experience.
We did test with all the options on the highest quality settings under the custom menu. Antialiasing has quite a high performance hit in this game, and is generally not worth it at high resolutions unless the game is running on a super powerhouse of a graphics card. If you're the kind of person who just must have AA enabled, you'll have to settle for a little bit lower resolution than we tend to like on reasonably priced graphics cards. Black & White 2 is almost not worth playing at low resolutions without AA, depth of field, or bloom enabled. At that point, we tend to get image quality that resembles the original Black & White. While various people believe that the original was a better game, no one doubts the superiority of B&W2's amazing graphics.
At 1600x1200, the 7950 GT performs very similarly to the 512MB (and more expensive) X1900 XT. While even the 7900 GS is playable here, framerates on the level of the 7950 GT begin to allow the gamer to experiment with AA in the game.
Not much changes with resolution with respect to the 7950 GT. The performance gap between the 7950 GT and X1900 XT does narrow somewhat with increasing resolution, but the two are basically tied in performance. The 7900 GTX SLI becomes CPU limited at 1280x1024, so anything more than 7950 GT SLI is not necessary without a higher resolution or antialiasing. In general, NVIDIA cards seem to scale very slightly better than ATI under Black & White 2 at the tested resolutions and settings.
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Calin - Thursday, September 14, 2006 - link
Maybe they just ignore some visual artifacts if the playing experience is good.DerekWilson - Thursday, September 14, 2006 - link
winners don't use drugs :-Palso, I'm not trying to imply that we would like more fps for free -- just that (with oblivion) turning up the settings offers better playability (things don't pop out of no where right next to you) and a better visual experience than a higher framerate with less eye candy.
plus, my wife hates jaggies. jaggies and bad anisotropic filtering. I've not seen her react to lag, as she doesn't usually play games where lag is a factor. but she definitely hates waiting for anything, so I'd guess she'd hate lag too.
LoneWolf15 - Thursday, September 14, 2006 - link
Personally, I hope the Frag Dolls kick your butt for that remark. I'd pay money to see it.yacoub - Thursday, September 14, 2006 - link
PASSIVELY-COOLED top-tier GPU?! SWEET. Finally. :)goatfajitas - Thursday, September 14, 2006 - link
I would really like to see the 256mb version of 7950GT tested against the 512mb version (biostar makes both, but clocks are easy enough to adjust on any card) at various resolutions with and without 4xAA to see when/if the 512 megs helps speed things up.tuteja1986 - Thursday, September 14, 2006 - link
7950GT availability is terrible.. its looks like a 7800GTX 512MB launch.. few card released on day and none to seen for weeks ?Surprising I see ATI not having a paper launch with the X1950XTX which is amazing if you see ATI track record with delays after delays
At the moment i don't think its wise to buy them , as i hear G80 product start next month and early November launch.
I also hear that R600 has run in some trouble and i don't think they will be out this year and will lag 3months behind G80 launch. I would say Mid Jan if they fix what ever problem the engineers are having at ATI.
DerekWilson - Thursday, September 14, 2006 - link
a 256mb version should really be branded as an overclocked 7900 GT, but I won't argue that too much :-)we are planning on doing a roundup of 7950 Gt cards, and we will address this issue at that time.
thanks,
Derek Wilson
goatfajitas - Thursday, September 14, 2006 - link
Thanks. I should have guessed something like that would be coming from AT.retrospooty - Thursday, September 14, 2006 - link
cool. thanks.R3MF - Thursday, September 14, 2006 - link
i wonder if its possible?that with a Core 2 Duo 6600 would be a hell of a SFF combination!