Tom will take over the discussion from here analyzing benchmarks and wrapping up our collective thoughts on the GTX -
Our hardware platform has remained unchanged from our Catalyst 5.6 Review. To recap, here are the specifications again: - Athlon 64 3000+ Winchester @ 2.25 GHz (250*9)
- DFI LanParty NF4 SLI-DR motherboard
- 2*512 MB OCZ PC4200 @ 250 MHz, 2.5-3-3-8-1T
- Western Digital 1200JD SATA hard drive
- OCZ ModStream 520W power supply
The list of contenders is as follows:
- NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX 256 MB PCIe (430/1200 MHz)
- NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX 256 MB PCIe (400/1100 MHz)*
- NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT 256 MB PCIe @ Ultra speeds (400/1100 MHz)
- NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT 256 MB PCIe x2 (SLI, 350/1100 MHz)
- ATI Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition 256 MB PCIe (540/1180 MHz)
* We underclocked our GeForce 7800 GTX to 6800 Ultra speeds in order to investigate the performance differences between the NV40 and G70 cores. You can find the results of these tests in the "Scaling" section of the review.
Drivers used were ForceWare version 77.62 and nForce version 6.53.
Finally, here is a listing of tests we performed:
- 3DMark 2005 Professional (Fill rate, vertex shader, pixel shader)
- Aquamark 3
- Doom 3
- Far Cry
- Halo
- Half-Life 2 (Video Stress Test)
- Jedi Knight 2
- Splinter Cell 3: Chaos Theory (Shader model v1.1)
- Splinter Cell 3: Chaos Theory (Shader model v3.0)
- Unreal Tournament 2004
Testing methodologies and settings used will be outlined before each game chart.
Note: We were going to include Call of Duty results, but severe testing anomalies resulted in us deciding to ditch the results. The ATI card didn't present any anomalous results, but when testing the NVIDIA cards, we would see wildly-fluctuating results for multiple runs of the same resolution. Not only that, but at times, higher resolutions were performing better than lower resolutions. Again, this was only happening on the NVIDIA cards. We will investigate this issue further and report back on the results.
