Power Within Reach: NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB
by Derek Wilson on February 12, 2007 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Battlefield 2 Performance
Our Battlefield 2 test is run using the 1.3 version of the game and is based on frame data generated by a timedemo feature. We use a subset of the output in order to avoid problems benchmarking load screens. Our benchmark is a recording of a game played in the Daqing Oil Fields and if fairly stressful as far as BF2 action goes. First up we will look at performance at high quality with no AA enabled.
Our first tests show that the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB is very capable of keeping up with the 640MB version in certain scenarios. We see identical performance at 16x12, which is nearly CPU limited, with the gap between the cards slowly widening to about 12 percent at 2560x1600. As far as BF2 players are concerned, 90fps is plenty: EA/DICE cap performance during gameplay at 100fps. For gaming without AA, the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB knocks it out of the park here.
With 4xAA enabled, the story takes a dramatic turn. Scaling of the 320MB 8800 GTS is simply atrocious, moving from third out of eight at 16x12 to dead last at 2560x1600. The game becomes unplayable at our highest resolution test, and the impact of less memory in this situation is incredibly clear.
It is quite interesting to note that both the X1900 256MB and the X1950 Pro both have 64MB less than the 8800 GTS 320MB. Battlefield 2 with 4xAA isn't specifically limited by memory size, but the 8800 GTS itself has trouble running the game at these settings with less memory. This means that the impact of memory size comes in to play with the hardware itself or NVIDIA's driver while running Battlefield 2 at high resolutions with 4xAA. We will certainly be digging into this issue more in the future.
Our Battlefield 2 test is run using the 1.3 version of the game and is based on frame data generated by a timedemo feature. We use a subset of the output in order to avoid problems benchmarking load screens. Our benchmark is a recording of a game played in the Daqing Oil Fields and if fairly stressful as far as BF2 action goes. First up we will look at performance at high quality with no AA enabled.
Our first tests show that the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB is very capable of keeping up with the 640MB version in certain scenarios. We see identical performance at 16x12, which is nearly CPU limited, with the gap between the cards slowly widening to about 12 percent at 2560x1600. As far as BF2 players are concerned, 90fps is plenty: EA/DICE cap performance during gameplay at 100fps. For gaming without AA, the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB knocks it out of the park here.
With 4xAA enabled, the story takes a dramatic turn. Scaling of the 320MB 8800 GTS is simply atrocious, moving from third out of eight at 16x12 to dead last at 2560x1600. The game becomes unplayable at our highest resolution test, and the impact of less memory in this situation is incredibly clear.
It is quite interesting to note that both the X1900 256MB and the X1950 Pro both have 64MB less than the 8800 GTS 320MB. Battlefield 2 with 4xAA isn't specifically limited by memory size, but the 8800 GTS itself has trouble running the game at these settings with less memory. This means that the impact of memory size comes in to play with the hardware itself or NVIDIA's driver while running Battlefield 2 at high resolutions with 4xAA. We will certainly be digging into this issue more in the future.
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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!