GeForce 8800 Roundup: The Best of the Best

Overclocked Performance

Once we achieved our overclocks for these cards, we wanted to see what kind of performance gains we would see with the higher clock speeds. Our test system was the same one we used for the 8800 launch tests:

We tested the performance of these cards with two games at the same settings as our performance tests in the 8800 launch article to keep things consistent. The two games we chose for performance testing are F.E.A.R and Oblivion. We tested both games at 1920x1440 resolution, with 4xAA for F.E.A.R, and no AA/16xAF for Oblivion. Our settings for Oblivion were the same as those in our 8800 launch tests, with all quality settings on or at their highest and with HDR enabled. In F.E.A.R. we put all quality settings at their highest, with the exception of the "soft shadows" option, which we feel creates too much of a performance hit given the poor effect it creates.

In F.E.A.R. with the overclock on the XFX 8800 GTS we see about a 16% boost in performance at 1920x1440. In Oblivion we see almost a 40% increase in performance with the overclocked XFX 8800 GTS. Among the 8800 GTX cards, we see that as we would expect the MSI and EVGA samples saw some of the best performance with their overclocks.

In F.E.A.R we see increases in performance of about 14%, and in Oblivion, increases of around 26% between the factory clocked and user-overclocked cards. Keep in mind that with Oblivion, there is some variance (< 5%) in the frame rate between benchmarks because it is a manual run-through of a save game using FRAPS.