Power Within Reach: NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB
by Derek Wilson on February 12, 2007 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Half-Life 2: Episode One Performance
Games based on Valve's Source engine have long been a staple of our test suites. Constantly evolving, HL2:EP1 show off some of the newer features of the engine. We are using the latest version of the game available on Steam as of the publication of this article. Our benchmark makes use of the timedemo functionality provided through Source. The demo we recorded is a battle with a flying gunship in a wooden house in which house and gunship are blown to bits. All the settings are turned up as high as they will go.
Half-Life 2: Episode One brings us another test where the extra 320MB of RAM the original 8800 GTS enjoys makes no difference when AA is not enabled. Performance between the two variants is identical here with all the settings but AA cranked up. Even at 2560x1600 there is no real difference, which is quite impressive for a card with less than 512MB of RAM.
Enabling 4xAA shows us that we can still get good performance at resolutions below 2560x1600 along with antialiasing. Up until our highest resolution test, the two 8800 GTS cards performed very similarly. This means that even at high resolutions with AA enabled, HL2:EP1 doesn't incur the same penalty on the 8800 GTS 320MB that other games do.
Games based on Valve's Source engine have long been a staple of our test suites. Constantly evolving, HL2:EP1 show off some of the newer features of the engine. We are using the latest version of the game available on Steam as of the publication of this article. Our benchmark makes use of the timedemo functionality provided through Source. The demo we recorded is a battle with a flying gunship in a wooden house in which house and gunship are blown to bits. All the settings are turned up as high as they will go.
Half-Life 2: Episode One brings us another test where the extra 320MB of RAM the original 8800 GTS enjoys makes no difference when AA is not enabled. Performance between the two variants is identical here with all the settings but AA cranked up. Even at 2560x1600 there is no real difference, which is quite impressive for a card with less than 512MB of RAM.
Enabling 4xAA shows us that we can still get good performance at resolutions below 2560x1600 along with antialiasing. Up until our highest resolution test, the two 8800 GTS cards performed very similarly. This means that even at high resolutions with AA enabled, HL2:EP1 doesn't incur the same penalty on the 8800 GTS 320MB that other games do.
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A5 - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
People with a 19" monitor aren't going to drop $300+ on a video card. You can get a X1950 Pro for $175 that can handle 1280x1024 in pretty much every game out today.jsmithy2007 - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
Are you high? I know plenty of people with 19 and 21" CRTs that use latest gen GPUs. These people are typically called "gamers" or "enthusiasts," perhaps you've heard of these terms. Even at moderate resolutions (1280x1024, 1600x1200), to run a game like Oblivion with all the eye candy turned on really does require a higher end GPU. Hell, I need 2 7800GTXs in SLI to just barely play with max settings at 1280x1024 while running 2xAA. Granted my GPUs are getting a little long in the tooth, but the point is still the same.Omega215D - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
Yes but the X1950 Pro doesn't do DirectX 10 and hopefully with the new unified shader architecture the 8800GTS won't be too obsolete when majority of the games shipping will be DX10.I run a widescreen 19" monitor at 1440 x 900, for some reason my card can run games when I was at the 1280 x 1024 res but now games have become a little choppy in this resolution even though the pixel count is less... any idea why?
DerekWilson - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
Non standard resolutions can sometimes have an impact on performance depeding on the hardware, game, and driver combination.As far as DX10 goes, gamers who run 12x10 are best off waiting to upgrade to new hardware.
There will be parts that will perform very well at 12x10 while costing much less than $300 and providing DX10 support from both AMD and NVIDIA at some point in the future. At this very moment, DX10 doesn't matter that much, and dropping all that money on a card that won't provide any real benefit without a larger monitor or some games that really take advantage of the advanced features just isn't something we can recommend.
damsaddm - Tuesday, February 27, 2018 - link
Where is the download link? I found the link here: https://secondgeek.com/drivers/nvidia-geforce-8800...It is working...