Date:
Tuesday , July 27, 2004
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Sean Quinn
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BFGTech GeForce 6800U OC with Water Block

Want to know what the fastest GeForce 6800Ultra in existence will do for you in games? We show what the BFGTech GeForce 6800Ultra OC with Water Cooling can do for you in real gaming situations.

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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 changed up some of the settings in Flight Sim 2004 in light of these 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 and Trilinear filtering and textures set to maximum. 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 can start off with the exact same settings each time. Once the game was loaded, we set the autopilot 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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In Flight Simulator 2004 we found 1600x1200 with 2xAA and 8xAF to be the highest playable settings on both 6800Ultra video cards. The BFGTech 6800Ultra with Water Block managed to gain a slight performance advantage, but not much. It is possible the video card is memory bandwidth limited in this game with the given fillrate. It is clear though that the 6800 series is performing better in Flight Simulator 2004 when compared to the X800XT-PE.

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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.