NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 (G80): GPUs Re-architected for DirectX 10
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on November 8, 2006 6:01 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
F.E.A.R. Performance
With the latest 1.08 patch, F.E.A.R. has gained multi-core support, potentially using even up to quad core CPUs in order to deliver improved performance. We were able to confirm a performance increase with Core 2 Duo, and we will try to take a look at whether or not Core 2 Quad helps in the near future. Either way, this means that we should now be completely GPU limited in F.E.A.R. testing.
The new GeForce 8800 GTX card still manages to come out faster than the competition, but this time a single 8800 GTX is not able to surpass the performance of dual X1950 XTX cards (or 7900 GTX SLI for that matter). Quad SLI also manages to make a decent showing in this particular benchmark, coming in second place except at the highest resolution. Meanwhile, GeForce 8800 GTS doesn't fare as well, only managing to tie the X1950 XTX for performance, and it even loses that battle at 2560x1600. F.E.A.R. is a game that can use a lot of memory bandwidth, so it's likely that the 2GHz GDDR4 memory on the X1950 XTX is helping out.
If money isn't a concern, 8800 GTX SLI will finally allow you to play F.E.A.R. at 2560x1600 with 4xAA without dropping below 30 FPS. Is that really necessary? Probably not to most people, but if a similar situation exists in other games it becomes a bit more feasible.
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JarredWalton - Wednesday, November 8, 2006 - link
The text is basically complete, and minor spelling issues aren't going to change the results. Obviously, proofing 29 pages of article content is going to take some time. We felt our readers would be a lot more interested in getting the content now rather than waiting even longer for me to proof everything. I know the vast majority of readers don't bother to comment on spelling and grammar issues, but my post was to avoid the comments section turning into a bunch of short posts complaining about errors that will be corrected shortly. :)Iger - Wednesday, November 8, 2006 - link
Pff, of course we would! If I would like to read a novel I would find a book! Results first - proofing later... if ever :) Thanks for the article!JarredWalton - Wednesday, November 8, 2006 - link
Did I say an hour? Okay, how about I just post here when I'm done reading/editing? :)JarredWalton - Wednesday, November 8, 2006 - link
Okay, I'm done proofing/editing. If you still see errors, feel free to complain. Like I said, though, try to keep them in this thread.--Jarred
LuxFestinus - Thursday, November 9, 2006 - link
Pg. 3 under <b>Unified Shaders</b>Should read as follows:
<i>Until now, building a GPU with unified shaders would not have <b>been</b> desirable, let alone practical, but Shader Model 4.0 lends itself well to this approach.</i>
Good try though.;)
shabby - Wednesday, November 8, 2006 - link
$600 for the gtx and $450 for the gts is pretty good seeing how much they crammed into the gpu, makes you wonder why the previous gen topped 650 bucks at times.dcalfine - Wednesday, November 8, 2006 - link
How does the 8800GTX compare to the 7950GX2? Not just in FPS, but also in performance/watt?dcalfine - Wednesday, November 8, 2006 - link
Ignore ^^^sorry
Hot card by the way!
neogodless - Wednesday, November 8, 2006 - link
I know you touched on this, but I assume that DirectX 10 is still not available for your testing platform, Windows XP Professional SP2, and additionally no games have been released for that platform. Is this correct? If so...Will DirectX 10 be made available for Windows XP?
Will you publish a new review once Vista, DirectX 10 and the new games are available?
Can we peak into the future at all now?
JarredWalton - Wednesday, November 8, 2006 - link
DX10 will be Vista only according to Microsoft. What that means according to some game developers is that DX10 support is going to be somewhat slow, and it's also going to be a major headache because for the next 3-4 years they will pretty much be required to have a DX9 rendering solution along with DX10.