X-bit labs

ASUS Extreme N7800 GTX TOP: RADEON X1800 XT Gets an Extreme Rival (page 17)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov

[ 10/24/2005 | 11:54 AM ]

Performance in Third Person 3D Shooters

Prince of Persia: Warrior Within

The ASUS Extreme N7800GTX TOP is 15% ahead of the GeForce 7800 GTX in 1600x1200 and this is enough to beat the RADEON X1800 XT as well as the rest of the cards. The performance gain is negligible in lower resolutions – the game uses only simple pixel shaders, so the 56MHz GPU frequency increase over the standard GeForce 7800 GTX must be too small to affect the shader execution speed much. Meanwhile, the memory subsystem performance becomes more important in 1600x1200 and the memory frequency increase from 1.2 to 1.35GHz is most welcome since it leads to a bandwidth increase from 38.4GB/s to 43.2GB/s.

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory uses version 3.0 pixel shaders if the graphics card supports Shader Model 3.0. The GPU clock rate plays an important role then, and it is the higher GPU frequency that helps the ASUS card to compete with the RADEON X1800 XT which had previously been a leader in this test. The senior RADEON X1800 model still has the best min fps value, however.

The RADEON X1800 XT rarely meets any competition in the “eye candy” mode, with enabled 4x FSAA and 16x anisotropic filtering. Even the overclocked memory can’t help the ASUS Extreme N7800GTX TOP here – its frequency is still below 1.5GHz (the memory frequency of the RADEON X1800 XT) and, as all GeForce 7 series cards, it has a less efficient memory controller than the RADEON X1800 series have. The ASUS card holds its second place in the “eye candy” mode, however, outperforming the reference GeForce 7800 GTX by 10-12%. The ASUS Extreme N7800GTX TOP and the RADEON X1800 XT both allow you to play Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory comfortably in all modes and resolutions, although the min performance of the ASUS card is very close to the dangerous mark of 30fps in 1600x1200 resolution of the “eye candy” mode.