X-bit labs

From Extreme to Mainstream: Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT from Leadtek (page 12)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 12/03/2007 | 03:09 PM ]

Call of Juarez

ATI’s Radeon HD 2900 solutions used to be better in Call of Juarez, but the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT has come to end this tradition. The version with standard frequencies outperforms the Radeon HD 2900 Pro while the pre-overclocked version from Leadtek is as fast as the Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB while having a lower price. We guess the increase in the number of shader processors and their frequency relative to the GeForce 8800 GTS is the main factor contributing to this success.

Both versions of GeForce 8800 GT allow playing at a resolution of 1600x1200 with enough comfort. The owner of a WinFast PX8800 GT Extreme can even try to launch the game at 1920x1200 knowing that the speed will never drop below 25fps. You don’t need as high an average frame rate in Call of Juarez as in most other 3D shooters due to the specifics of its gameplay.

New in this review is our use of the final version of Call of Juarez with the DX10 Enhancement Pack.

Performance in DirectX 10 mode is as low as in the non-interactive demo we used earlier. You can only have a speed of near 20fps at 1280x1024, and the GeForce 8800 GT is 15% and 5% slower than the GeForce 8800 GTX in its ordinary and pre-overclocked versions, respectively.

The new card from Nvidia seems to be limited by its memory performance at higher resolutions as it falls far behind the flagship model. Perhaps the reason is in the architecture of the G92’s texture processors which are less efficient at performing complex filtering than the G80’s ones. Well, that’s rather a theoretical problem since every card is too slow in this test for normal gaming.