Date:
Tuesday , January 17, 2012
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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Star Trek Online DX11 Performance Review

Star Trek Online has recently added DX11 Beta support, and we wanted to know how AMD's latest Radeon HD 7970 compared to NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580 in the game and if DX11 provided any kind of performance difference over DX9. Our results were not what we expected.

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Evaluation Method

We evaluate what each video card configuration can supply us in terms of a playable gaming experience while supplying the best culmination of resolution and "eye candy" graphical settings. We focus on quality and immersion of the gameplay experience rather than how many frames per second the card can get in a canned benchmark or prerecorded timedemo situation that often do not represent real gameplay like you would experience at home. Then we will follow with apples-to-apples testing in with minimum, maximum, and average framerates.

Test System Setup

We will be using an ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution motherboard, an Intel Core i7 2600K Overclocked at 4.8GHz, and 8GB of Corsair RAM.

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Drivers

For the AMD Radeon HD 7970 we are using the web driver dated 1/9 which can be found here. Coincidentally, this driver version is the same driver as the December 20th test driver handed out by AMD for reviewers. This is the latest driver at the time of evaluation.

For the MSI GTX 580 Lightning 3GB video card we are using ForceWare 290.53 Beta.

Video Cards

Note that we are using an MSI N580GTX Lightning XE 3GB video card in comparison here today. This video card is at the same price point now as a Radeon HD 7970. This video card is overclocked on the core and memory. Exact clock speeds are 832MHz core, 1664MHz shaders and 4.2GHz memory. The stock clocks of a GTX 580 are 772MHz core, 1544MHz shaders and 4GHz memory.

The Radeon HD 7970 is at stock clock speeds.