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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.
Quake 4
(OpenGL)
We are using the full retail version of Quake 4 for our game play evaluation. We are leaving each video card’s control panel to “Application Preference” for AA and AF. We will set the quality level in-game. Setting “High Quality” mode automatically enables 4XAF. Setting “Ultra Quality” mode automatically enables 8XAF.
For our manual run-through, we chose the “Hub 1” level and used FRAPS to capture the frame rate every second and started our run-through from the beginning to half way through the mission. We played the game in a normal fashion, which means each run-through on each card will be a little different, but it still represents the same course through the level.
Single Video Cards:
As we noted in our Radeon X1800 XT Preview, while performance was there to play at the “Ultra Quality” setting on the Radeon X1800 XT, we could not call this setting optimal. There is a bug that causes the game to crash to the desktop in several levels in Quake 4 when running in “Ultra Quality” mode on the Radeon X1800 XT. “High Quality” mode works just fine, so we used this setting with the Radeon X1800 XT. We did not encounter any problems running in “Ultra Quality” on the 512 MB GeForce 7800 GTX, so we used this as the highest playable quality setting.
The 512 MB GeForce 7800 GTX allowed us to play at Ultra Quality at 1600x1200 with 2X Transparency Supersampling and 8XAF with very smooth frame rates. The BFGTech GeForce 7800 GTX OC 256 MB played best at 1600x1200 with High Quality 2X Transparency Multisampling and 4XAF. Therefore, the 512 MB 7800 GTX allows you to run Qake 4 in Ultra Quality mode with 8XAF and with Transparency Supersampling. Both performance and playable quality settings were higher on the 512 MB GeForce 7800 GTX compared to the Radeon X1800 XT 512 MB video card. Even with Transparency Supersampling enabled, the 512 MB 7800 GTX is faster than the Radeon X1800 XT (as the graph shows).
SLI:
When you SLI two 256 MB video cards, the framebuffer is not combined; there are still two separate 256 MB framebuffers since the data has to be duplicated between the video cards. Therefore, High Quality was still the highest playable quality setting even on two GeForce 7800 GTX 256 MB cards in SLI. With the 512 MB GeForce 7800 GTX, however, with SLI, Ultra Quality is very playable just like it is with a single card. Both are very playable at 1600x1200 with 4X Transparency Supersampling in Quake 4. Even with the 512 MB 7800 GTX in Ultra Quality mode with 8XAF, performance is still faster than with two 7800 GTX 256 MB video cards in SLI. The average frame rate is at a very high 58 FPS, and it only dropped below 30 FPS briefly once during our run-through. Two 256 MB GeForce 7800 GTXs fell below the 30 FPS mark more than a few times.
Multiplayer:
GeForce 7800 GTX 512 MB - We think the extra RAM is helping Multiplayer performance because 1600x1200 at 2X TR SSAA in Ultra Quality mode was playable. There were a few instances where we saw 30 FPS when there were 12 or more players on the screen. If this isn’t acceptable to you, you can drop to High Quality mode or drop to TR MSAA to improve performance further.
GeForce 7800 GTX 512 MB - Performance in SLI is even faster in Multiplayer. You can easily play at 1600x1200 with 4X TR SSAA/8XAF Ultra Quality mode. There were a few instances of performance dropping into the lower 30s with a lot of players on the screen. If needed, you could drop to High Quality or TR MSAA to improve performance.
Image Quality:
In the two screenshots above, you can see the difference that going from High Quality to Ultra Quality has on the textures. The biggest difference is that 8XAF is enabled in Ultra Quality mode.