Performance in First-Person 3D Shooters

Battlefield 2142

This game doesn’t support display resolutions of 16:10 format, so we use a resolution of 1920x1440 pixels (4:3 format) instead of 1920x1200 for it.

You can’t expect a real high performance boost from the modest frequency growth of the Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX. It is ahead of the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB by a mere 5-6%. Not very impressive for a graphics card that claims to be the flagship of Nvidia’s single-chip solution line-up.

BioShock

BioShock doesn’t support FSAA when running in Windows Vista’s DirectX 10 environment. That’s why we benchmarked the cards without FSAA.

The new card is only 7% ahead of the previous topmost G92-based model at best. This performance gain is not really worth the extra $50 Nvidia asks for it. At high resolutions the GeForce 9800 GTX is as fast as the ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2. The latter has a somewhat higher minimum of speed, but is more expensive, produces more noise and consumes more power.