Power Within Reach: NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB
by Derek Wilson on February 12, 2007 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Words
The performance of the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB is very solid in most cases. It is possible for the reduced amount of onboard memory to severely retard the capabilities of the G80, as we have seen in a few select cases at high resolutions with AA enabled. Battlefield 2 was the hardest hit by the memory size decrease with AA, rendering the game unplayable at 2560x1600 with 4xAA (while without AA, framerates approach the 100fps cap). Of course, most gamers don't have 30" panels, and 1600x1200 and 1920x1200 really seem to treat this card well.
Without AA, the only real issue is with Quake 4, which uses a huge amount of onboard memory to store uncompressed textures and normal maps in the Ultra mode we test. The visual quality difference between High and Ultra quality in Quake 4 is very small for the performance impact it has in this case, so Quake 4 (or other Doom 3 engine game) fans who purchase the 8800 GTS 320MB may wish to avoid Ultra mode.
Based on the games and settings we tested, we feel very confident in recommending the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB to gamers who run at 1920x1200 or less without AA enabled. With or without AA, at these resolutions games look good and play well on the new part. There are better values when AA is enabled in many cases, so those whose primary requirement is good AA at these high resolutions will have to look elsewhere. Gamers who invest in a 30" panel will likely also want a higher end graphics card, but for current games at resolutions under 2560x1600 the 8800 GTX can be a bit overkill.
It's always difficult to speculate about how this part will perform on future games and against future competitors. It is very tempting to try to extrapolate performance of next generation titles by looking at Oblivion and Rainbow Six: Vegas. While both sport cutting edge graphics, and Vegas is even based on Epic's Unreal Engine 3, it is still too early to tell what developers are going to do with memory usage. Will we see more compute intensive games like Oblivion and Rainbow Six? Or will huge uncompressed textures show up to the party as well? And we won't even venture a guess about AMD at this point.
But even if we don't look to the future, the 8800 GTS 320MB has a lot to recommend it. Performance in current games against current hardware at moderately high resolutions without AA put it on par with a part $100 more expensive. We are quite happy to have a slightly less expensive GeForce 8 Series card to play with, and we look forward to seeing how memory size will directly impact games in the future. It is also likely that NVIDIA has some additional driver tuning to complete, so in some instances the performance gap between the two GTS parts may decrease.
The performance of the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB is very solid in most cases. It is possible for the reduced amount of onboard memory to severely retard the capabilities of the G80, as we have seen in a few select cases at high resolutions with AA enabled. Battlefield 2 was the hardest hit by the memory size decrease with AA, rendering the game unplayable at 2560x1600 with 4xAA (while without AA, framerates approach the 100fps cap). Of course, most gamers don't have 30" panels, and 1600x1200 and 1920x1200 really seem to treat this card well.
Without AA, the only real issue is with Quake 4, which uses a huge amount of onboard memory to store uncompressed textures and normal maps in the Ultra mode we test. The visual quality difference between High and Ultra quality in Quake 4 is very small for the performance impact it has in this case, so Quake 4 (or other Doom 3 engine game) fans who purchase the 8800 GTS 320MB may wish to avoid Ultra mode.
Based on the games and settings we tested, we feel very confident in recommending the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB to gamers who run at 1920x1200 or less without AA enabled. With or without AA, at these resolutions games look good and play well on the new part. There are better values when AA is enabled in many cases, so those whose primary requirement is good AA at these high resolutions will have to look elsewhere. Gamers who invest in a 30" panel will likely also want a higher end graphics card, but for current games at resolutions under 2560x1600 the 8800 GTX can be a bit overkill.
It's always difficult to speculate about how this part will perform on future games and against future competitors. It is very tempting to try to extrapolate performance of next generation titles by looking at Oblivion and Rainbow Six: Vegas. While both sport cutting edge graphics, and Vegas is even based on Epic's Unreal Engine 3, it is still too early to tell what developers are going to do with memory usage. Will we see more compute intensive games like Oblivion and Rainbow Six? Or will huge uncompressed textures show up to the party as well? And we won't even venture a guess about AMD at this point.
But even if we don't look to the future, the 8800 GTS 320MB has a lot to recommend it. Performance in current games against current hardware at moderately high resolutions without AA put it on par with a part $100 more expensive. We are quite happy to have a slightly less expensive GeForce 8 Series card to play with, and we look forward to seeing how memory size will directly impact games in the future. It is also likely that NVIDIA has some additional driver tuning to complete, so in some instances the performance gap between the two GTS parts may decrease.
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nicolasb - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
The conclusion to this article:This conclusion does not seem to bear much resemblance to the actual observations. In virtually every case the card performed well without AA, but dismally as soon as 4xAA was switched on. A fair conclusion would be to recommend the card for resolutions up to 1920x1200 without AA, but definitely not with.
DerekWilson - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
The GTS 320MB still performs well if taken on its own at 19x12 with 4xAA ... But I will modify the comment to better reflect what I mean.nicolasb - Tuesday, February 13, 2007 - link
The way the conclusion now reads is a big improvement, IMNSHO. :-)munky - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
I was expecting better performance with AA enabled, and the article just glossed over the fact that the in half the games with AA the card performed on par or worse than last gen card that cost less.Bob Markinson - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
For the base Oblivion install, yes, it's not so much of a memory hog. In-game texture use usually doesn't exceed 256 MB with HDR and 4xAA on @ 1152x864. (Also, please test AA perf too with HDR, both ATI and Nvidia do support it on their current gen cards at the same time.)Most popular texture mods will bring up the memory usage north of 500 MB. I've seen it hit over 700 MB. Thus, there's a good chance that any 256 MB card would be crippled with texture swapping. I should know, mine is.
Bob Markinson - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
For the base Oblivion install, yes, it's not so much of a memory hog. In-game texture use usually doesn't exceed 256 MB with HDR and 4xAA on @ 1152x864. (Also, please test AA perf too with HDR, both ATI and Nvidia do support it on their current gen cards at the same time.)Most popular texture mods will bring up the memory usage north of 500 MB. I've seen it hit over 700 MB. Thus, there's a good chance that any 256 MB card would be crippled with texture swapping. I should know, mine is.
DerekWilson - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
What texture mod would you recommend we test with?Bob Markinson - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
Qarl's Texture Pack 2 and 3 are quite popular world texture packs. Please check this site for more details:http://devnull.devakm.googlepages.com/totoworld">http://devnull.devakm.googlepages.com/totoworld
Note that version 3 really does need a lot of texture memory. Also, check out Qarl's 4096 compressed landscape LOD normal map texture pack, it'll add far more depth than the plain, overly filtered Oblivion LOD textures.
DerekWilson - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
We will take a look at those texture packs and do some testing ...Hopefully we can provide a follow up further exploring the impact of memory on the 8800 architecture.
blackbrrd - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
I looked at the Oblivion scores, and the first thing that hit me was: they are using the standard crappy looking textures!No oblivion fan running a 8800gts would run with the standard texture pack. It is, at times, really really bad.
Running a texture pack like the one above is quite normal. If you have enough video card memory there isn't much of a slowdown - except when the data is loaded into memory - which happends all the time... It does make the game look nicer though!