Fall '06 NVIDIA GPU Refresh - Part II: GeForce 7950 GT and SLI

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.