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- Date:
- Monday , November 14, 2005
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX 512 MB Preview
NVIDIA pulls out all the stops and shows us what the GeForce 7800 GTX GPU can really do. We take a look at the 512 MB GeForce 7800 GTX and compare it to the Radeon X1800 XT 512 MB video card in eight games. We even get to play F.E.A.R at 1600x1200 with 4X AA.
System Test Setup:
CPU | AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 |
Motherboard | ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe |
System Memory | 4 x 512 MB Corsair XMS PC3200LLPro |
Hard Drive | Western Digital 74GB Raptor SATA/150 |
OS | Windows XP Pro SP2 with DirectX 9.0c |
For our system platform setup, we are using the nForce4-based ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard and an AMD Athlon 64 FX-55.
Video Cards:
Make & Model | Platform | Core Clock | Memory Clock | Driver Version | Notes |
ATI Radeon X1800 XT 512 MB | PCIe | 625MHz | 1.5GHz | Beta Catalyst 5.11 (8.183) | Non WHQL |
BFGTech GeForce 7800 GTX OC 256 MB | PCIe | 460MHz | 1.3GHz | ForceWare 81.89 | Non WHQL |
2x NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX 256 MB SLI | PCIe | 430MHz | 1.2GHz | ForceWare 81.89 | Non WHQL |
2x NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX 512 MB | PCIe | 550MHz | 1.7GHz | ForceWare 81.89 | Non WHQL |
Game and Video Card Evaluation Setup
For our video card comparison, we are taking two reference NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX 512 MB video cards and evaluating them in single and SLI configuration versus the ATI Radeon X1800 XT 512 MB. We will also include a single BFGTech GeForce 7800 GTX OC 256 MB video card in the single video card graphs to see how the gaming experience is improved by moving to the 512 MB GeForce 7800 GTX.
We have two graphs, one with single cards, and one comparing two reference GeForce 7800 GTX 256 MB cards to two reference GeForce 7800 GTX 512 MB cards; it’s too bad we don’t have two X1800 XT Crossfire cards for a high-end SLI versus Crossfire comparison. We are using a beta ForceWare driver (81.89) that adds INF support for the 512 MB 7800 GTX. For the ATI Radeon X1800 XT, we are using the latest beta 8.183 drivers as provided by ATI.
Please be aware we test our video cards a bit differently from what is the norm. We concentrate on examining the real-world game play that each video card provides. The Highest Playable section shows the best Image Quality delivered at a playable frame rate. We use a high performance system with a very fast CPU in order to remove CPU bottlenecking.
In our graphs, we use the following abbreviations to indicate the method of anti-aliasing (AA) or anisotropic filtering (AF) we used:
AD AA = Adaptive AA – Indicates the use of ATI’s Adaptive AA on X1000 series video cards.
HA AF = High Quality Anisotropic Filtering – Indicates the use of ATI’s High Quality option for Anisotropic Filtering that is not angle dependent.
TR MSAA = Transparency Multisampling Anti-aliasing – Indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency Multisampling quality setting on GeForce 7 series video cards.
TR SSAA = Transparency Supersampling Anti-aliasing – Indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency Supersampling quality setting on GeForce 7 series video cards.