Power Within Reach: NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB
by Derek Wilson on February 12, 2007 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Battlefield 2 Performance
Our Battlefield 2 test is run using the 1.3 version of the game and is based on frame data generated by a timedemo feature. We use a subset of the output in order to avoid problems benchmarking load screens. Our benchmark is a recording of a game played in the Daqing Oil Fields and if fairly stressful as far as BF2 action goes. First up we will look at performance at high quality with no AA enabled.
Our first tests show that the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB is very capable of keeping up with the 640MB version in certain scenarios. We see identical performance at 16x12, which is nearly CPU limited, with the gap between the cards slowly widening to about 12 percent at 2560x1600. As far as BF2 players are concerned, 90fps is plenty: EA/DICE cap performance during gameplay at 100fps. For gaming without AA, the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB knocks it out of the park here.
With 4xAA enabled, the story takes a dramatic turn. Scaling of the 320MB 8800 GTS is simply atrocious, moving from third out of eight at 16x12 to dead last at 2560x1600. The game becomes unplayable at our highest resolution test, and the impact of less memory in this situation is incredibly clear.
It is quite interesting to note that both the X1900 256MB and the X1950 Pro both have 64MB less than the 8800 GTS 320MB. Battlefield 2 with 4xAA isn't specifically limited by memory size, but the 8800 GTS itself has trouble running the game at these settings with less memory. This means that the impact of memory size comes in to play with the hardware itself or NVIDIA's driver while running Battlefield 2 at high resolutions with 4xAA. We will certainly be digging into this issue more in the future.
Our Battlefield 2 test is run using the 1.3 version of the game and is based on frame data generated by a timedemo feature. We use a subset of the output in order to avoid problems benchmarking load screens. Our benchmark is a recording of a game played in the Daqing Oil Fields and if fairly stressful as far as BF2 action goes. First up we will look at performance at high quality with no AA enabled.
Our first tests show that the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB is very capable of keeping up with the 640MB version in certain scenarios. We see identical performance at 16x12, which is nearly CPU limited, with the gap between the cards slowly widening to about 12 percent at 2560x1600. As far as BF2 players are concerned, 90fps is plenty: EA/DICE cap performance during gameplay at 100fps. For gaming without AA, the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB knocks it out of the park here.
With 4xAA enabled, the story takes a dramatic turn. Scaling of the 320MB 8800 GTS is simply atrocious, moving from third out of eight at 16x12 to dead last at 2560x1600. The game becomes unplayable at our highest resolution test, and the impact of less memory in this situation is incredibly clear.
It is quite interesting to note that both the X1900 256MB and the X1950 Pro both have 64MB less than the 8800 GTS 320MB. Battlefield 2 with 4xAA isn't specifically limited by memory size, but the 8800 GTS itself has trouble running the game at these settings with less memory. This means that the impact of memory size comes in to play with the hardware itself or NVIDIA's driver while running Battlefield 2 at high resolutions with 4xAA. We will certainly be digging into this issue more in the future.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
55 Comments
View All Comments
tacoburrito - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
With all the eye candy turned on, the 320mb card seems to be only on par with the previous gen 79xx cards, but costs almost twice as much. I'd much rather cough up the extra $200 and get the full GTS version.DerekWilson - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
Actually, the 320MB card blows away the 7 series in our tests. Why would you say that it's only on par? At 16x12, the 8800 GTS 320MB is 60% faster, and the difference in performance only gets larger from there.tacoburrito - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
With the exception of Half Life 2, at 4x AA, wouldn't you say that the 8800 GTS 320 is only marginally better than 7950 GT, but would costs twice a much?tacoburrito - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
Whoops, I meant to say 7900 GTXDerekWilson - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
From the context of the thread, I assumed you were talking about Oblivion.Without AA, the 8800 320MB is much better than the 7900 GTX. With AA, there is an argument to be made, but the price of the 7900 GTX (as Jarred pointed out) is higher.
JarredWalton - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
I'd be very curious to find out where you're seeing 7900 GTX cards for "half the price". I don't see any in stock when taking a quick look at major resellers, and our http://labs.anandtech.com/products.php?sfilter=462">Pricing Engine confirms that. I'm pretty sure the 7900 GTX is discontinued now, and prices never got below $400.Wwhat - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
It still remains to be seen how DX10 games (or future OpenGL games that use geometry shaders?) run on the various incarnations of the new cards, you should have put that in the conclusion as a caveat, it's not just textures anymore you know.I don't thinks there's anything at all currently that uses geometry shaders, you wonder why some developer doesn't throw together a quick test utility, billions of people on the planet and nobody can do that little effort? geez.
Surely someone at crytek or Id or something can write a small looping thing with a framecounter? anand should send out some mails, get someone on his feet.
DerekWilson - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
There are some dx10 sample apps that make use of geometry shaders ... I've been working on testing these, but it is more difficult than it may seem as FRAPS has trouble with DX10 apps.You do have a point though -- DX10 performance will be important. The problem is that we can't really make a recommendation based on DX10 performance.
The 8 series parts do have more value than the 7 series and x1k series parts in that they support DX10. But this is as far as we can take it. Performance in the games we have does matter, and it is much more prudent to make a purchase only based on the information we know.
Sure, if the cost and performance of an 8 series part is the same or very near some DX9 class hardware, the features and DX10 support are there to recommend it over the competition. But it's hard to really use this information in any other capacity without knowing how good their DX10 support really is.
Awax - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
The main point for me is the low impact of memory size on modern games.On previous generation game, like Quake4, developers had to use a lot of high resolution texture/bump map/lookup map to achieve advanced effect with the limited capacity in raw performances and flexibility of the cards available.
With DX9 and more in DX10, the new way is to _CALCULATE_ things completely instead of having them interpolated with tricks using intermediary results or already computed lookup tables stored in textures.
DerekWilson - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
But new ways to calculate things will also benefit from having huge amounts of data to calculate things from.It's really hard to speculate on the direction DX10 games will take at this point. Certianly we will see more use of programmable features and a heavier impact on processing power. But memory usage will also increase. We'll just have to wait and see what happens.