Date:
Wednesday, July 14, 2004
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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BFGTech GeForce 6800GT OC Review

BFGTech’s GeForce 6800GT OC video card and the gaming experience it can deliver. We compare it to a 6800Ultra and Radeon X800Pro playing FarCry, FlightSim 2004, PainKiller, Nascar Thunder 2004, City of Heroes, and Madden 2004. The GeForce 6800GT may just be the best gaming card for the price.

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Flight Simulator 2004

(DirectX 9)

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We are using the full retail version of Microsoft’s Flight Simulator 2004. We have upped some of the settings in Flight Sim 2004 for these newer and more powerful high-end video cards. We have increased some of the visual quality settings in the game and have added a more intense scenario.

Under the hardware tab we have the resolution set for each card with Trilinear filtering and textures to max. Under the weather and aircraft settings we chose the “Ultra High” level. Under the Scenery settings we have customized it as you see it above. Note that we have ground shadows on and terrain mesh quality to maximum.

We performed a manual run using FRAPS to record the framerate. The method is simple; we hopped in a Bombardier Learjet 45 and took off from Seattle-Tacoma International. We chose this airport because it has ground textures, the rendering of water, and mountains on the horizon, which are the three main types of landscapes in the game. The weather was customized with varying levels of cloud cover and falling snow to utilize the particle system. We disabled the Weather rate of change so that it was static. The selected date and time was set for winter during the evening so that shadows would be cast from objects by the sun. Flight Simulator 2004 has a feature where you can save a scenario so that it could start off with the exact same settings each time. Once the game was loaded we set the Auto Pilot to take us on a straight line out from the airport up to an altitude of 20,000 feet at maximum power.

We pressed the “S” key until we had an outside view of the plane and panned around to the rear of the plane. We then enabled the on screen data with “Shift Z” so that we could see the altitude indicator. We then pressed “F4” on the keyboard at the same time as we started the FRAPS counter. With the plane on autopilot all we had to do was bring the gear up with “G” and watch it rise up to 20,000 feet while the camera had an outside view of the rear of the plane. When the indicator hit 20,000 feet we stopped the FRAPS recording. Doing this with a little practice gives an accurate set of repeatable results we can use for performance comparisons.

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As you can see our increased quality settings in the game cause performance to be slower than we have seen in the past, but the visual quality is improved. The Flight Sim 2004 engine is extremely flexible and is still able to go to much higher quality settings, which makes it a good game to use for testing new video cards now and in the future.

With the BFGTech 6800GT OC we found 1280x1024 with 2XAA and 8XAF to be the best mix of quality plus performance. In our test performance it did drop below 30fps for around 30 seconds, but this was in the very worse case scenario part of the test where everything, clouds, particle system, and shadows all come together in one amalgamation. For the rest of the test, performance remained very playable. With the GeForce 6800Ultra we found we could do 1600x1200 with 2XAA and 8XAF enabled.

The ATI Radeon X800Pro managed to achieve 1280x1024 2XAA with 8XAF, matching the BFGTech GeForce 6800GT OC in quality.

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In the first screenshot above we are hard pressed to see any differences in Anti-Aliasing quality between these cards on the plane. The quality of the lighting and sky also appear to be the same. In the next screenshot they are not taken at exactly the same place, but the screenshots do show the water reflection effect that this game is capable of and we can compare them. In the BFGTech 6800GT OC shot you can see that the effect looks feathery and slightly banded, while the Radeon X800Pro renders it with greater detail.

Overall you are seeing an "Apples to Apples" match up for the X800Pro and 6800GT. There is some give and take in frame rates, but again from a performance and IQ standpoint, you would find it difficult to tell the cards apart from your real-world gaming experience.