X-bit labs

Goes Like Hell: Gainward Bliss 8800 GT 512MB GS GLH Graphics Card Review (page 9)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 12/24/2007 | 09:19 AM ]

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

As opposed to the previous titles in the series, this sequel to Call of Duty does not allow to play for different factions but focuses on a linear plot set in our days. The game runs on an original engine with rather advanced special effects, including HDR dynamic shadows and depth-of-field, but does not utilize DirectX 10. A special feature of the physical model implemented in the game is the ability to shoot through obstacles such as wooden walls, car doors, etc, and the bullet’s killing force changes accordingly.

The results suggest that the game is not very demanding, but such cards as Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX and pre-overclocked GeForce 8800 GT 512MB cannot provide a frame rate of 50fps at 1920x1200. The effect of the clock rates of the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB is obvious here: the difference between the reference card and the Gainward Bliss 8800 GT 512MB GS GLH is as big as 23% at 1280x1024 and grows up to 30% at 1920x1200.

The results of the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB indicate that 320 megabytes of graphics memory is not enough for this game. The ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB suffers from insufficiently optimized drivers and, probably, from fundamental drawbacks of the Radeon HD architecture. Thus, the Gainward Bliss 8800 GT 512MB GS GLH or any other version of GeForce 8800 GT 512MB with similar specs is the optimal choice for playing Call of Duty 4 in terms of price/performance ratio.

Crysis

The game being too hard at its Very High level of detail, we benchmarked the cards without FSAA to get a more playable speed.

Not only the frequency of the shader processors but also their amount is important for Crysis. This can be seen from the results: the Gainward Bliss 8800 GT 512MB GS GLH can’t catch up with the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX in any of the test modes.

Anyway, the currently available hardware doesn’t allow to play Crysis normally at the Very High level of detail.