NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 (G80): GPUs Re-architected for DirectX 10
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on November 8, 2006 6:01 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
We're going to dispense with a lot of the introductory commentary for all of our gaming benchmarks, as we already have a ton of material to present. At this point, most of you are already familiar with what benchmarks we use and how they are run. If not, you should easily be able to find the information in a previous article. So, rather than adding hundreds of words of repeat text, we're just going to cut straight to the chase and talk about performance.
Company of Heroes Performance
Starting with Company of Heroes, we have a game that really stresses the graphics card at higher settings, though in the past we've also shown that it tends to be CPU limited with different detail settings. Running maximum details, all of the cards still managed to deliver acceptable gameplay at 1600x1200 or lower resolutions. 1920x1440 is still playable as well, but if you have a 30 inch LCD running 2560x1600 and you want to run with antialiasing, you're really going to need a GeForce 8800 series card. The GeForce 8800 is clearly more powerful than anything ATI currently offers, which is to be expected as it's a next-generation card competing with current generation hardware. What's impressive is that the 8800 GTX is basically as fast running 2560x1600 as the GeForce 7900 GTX or Radeon X1950 XTX running at 1600x1200. Put another way, a single 8800 GTX is over twice as fast as a single X1950 XTX in all of the tested resolutions, and it's also about twice as fast as a 7900 GTX.
As far as multiple graphics card configurations go, Company of Heroes currently did not show any performance improvements. Most likely that means that NVIDIA and ATI drivers have not been properly optimized for this game at present. This is a problem that occurs periodically with new titles, and it's always frustrating to get a new game only to find out that it isn't properly using your hardware -- especially if you've shelled out the money for dual graphics cards. This is why we have repeatedly recommended in the past that you purchase a faster single graphics card rather than moving to dual GPUs, up to the point where you basically have the fastest single graphics card available. GeForce 8800 GTX now holds the title of fastest single GPU, so if you were previously looking to spend $800 on a couple of GPUs, you should seriously consider a single 8800 GTX instead. The DirectX 10 support is merely icing on the cake.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
111 Comments
View All Comments
JarredWalton - Wednesday, November 8, 2006 - link
The text is basically complete, and minor spelling issues aren't going to change the results. Obviously, proofing 29 pages of article content is going to take some time. We felt our readers would be a lot more interested in getting the content now rather than waiting even longer for me to proof everything. I know the vast majority of readers don't bother to comment on spelling and grammar issues, but my post was to avoid the comments section turning into a bunch of short posts complaining about errors that will be corrected shortly. :)Iger - Wednesday, November 8, 2006 - link
Pff, of course we would! If I would like to read a novel I would find a book! Results first - proofing later... if ever :) Thanks for the article!JarredWalton - Wednesday, November 8, 2006 - link
Did I say an hour? Okay, how about I just post here when I'm done reading/editing? :)JarredWalton - Wednesday, November 8, 2006 - link
Okay, I'm done proofing/editing. If you still see errors, feel free to complain. Like I said, though, try to keep them in this thread.--Jarred
LuxFestinus - Thursday, November 9, 2006 - link
Pg. 3 under <b>Unified Shaders</b>Should read as follows:
<i>Until now, building a GPU with unified shaders would not have <b>been</b> desirable, let alone practical, but Shader Model 4.0 lends itself well to this approach.</i>
Good try though.;)
shabby - Wednesday, November 8, 2006 - link
$600 for the gtx and $450 for the gts is pretty good seeing how much they crammed into the gpu, makes you wonder why the previous gen topped 650 bucks at times.dcalfine - Wednesday, November 8, 2006 - link
How does the 8800GTX compare to the 7950GX2? Not just in FPS, but also in performance/watt?dcalfine - Wednesday, November 8, 2006 - link
Ignore ^^^sorry
Hot card by the way!
neogodless - Wednesday, November 8, 2006 - link
I know you touched on this, but I assume that DirectX 10 is still not available for your testing platform, Windows XP Professional SP2, and additionally no games have been released for that platform. Is this correct? If so...Will DirectX 10 be made available for Windows XP?
Will you publish a new review once Vista, DirectX 10 and the new games are available?
Can we peak into the future at all now?
JarredWalton - Wednesday, November 8, 2006 - link
DX10 will be Vista only according to Microsoft. What that means according to some game developers is that DX10 support is going to be somewhat slow, and it's also going to be a major headache because for the next 3-4 years they will pretty much be required to have a DX9 rendering solution along with DX10.