X-bit labs

1GB Is a GB: Gainward Bliss 8800 GT 1024MB GS Graphics Card Review (page 9)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 02/14/2008 | 11:04 AM ]

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.

Oddly enough, Crysis doesn’t seem to need more than 512MB of memory even considering the defect in the Nvidia driver. The difference between the Gainward card and the reference card from Nvidia is explained by the difference in their clock rates. Perhaps 1GB of graphics memory would be helpful if we tested the cards with enabled FSAA.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

The frame rate is fixed at 30fps in this game as this is the rate at which the physical model is being updated at the server. Thus, this 30fps speed is the required minimum for playing the game.

The performance gain is high at high resolutions: 25-27% cannot be only due to the factory overclocking. Well, this is something you could expect considering the MegaTexture technology: each texture that describes a level of Quake Wars has a resolution of 32768x32768 pixels and takes about 3GB in uncompressed form. This performance gain does not affect the level of comfort much, yet it’s good to have an additional reserve of speed anyway.