Prey

Strangely enough, it is in an OpenGL application where Nvidia’s cards have always used to prevail that the GeForce 8800 GTX doesn’t show anything exceptional. Yes, it is ahead of every other single card, including the dual-processor GeForce 7950 GX2, but is slower than the GeForce 7950 Quad SLI and even than the Radeon X1950 XTX CrossFire in high resolutions. It seems Nvidia’s programmers haven’t yet fully optimized the driver for the new graphics card series.

The GeForce 8800 GTX looks better here and is competing with the Radeon X1950 XTX CrossFire. Yet it is still slower than the GeForce 7950 Quad SLI and doesn’t give you a comfortable speed in resolutions above 1280x1024.

In spite of the impressive specs of the GeForce 8800 GTX, particularly of its extraordinary memory subsystem bandwidth, our turning on 16xQ CSAA mode leads to a performance hit below comfortable level. We guess that only SLI tandems made out of two GeForce 8800 GTX or GTS cards would provide an acceptable speed here.

Note the surprisingly high result of the Radeon X1950 XTX CrossFire system in 1920x1200 ?it just doesn’t turn on 14x Super AA mode then.