X-bit labs

From Extreme to Mainstream: Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT from Leadtek (page 15)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko

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

Half-Life 2: Episode Two

The reference and pre-overclocked versions of GeForce 8800 GT are both far ahead of every other graphics card but Episode Two is a heavier application than Episode One and none of these cards, including the Leadtek, cannot provide the desired frame rate of 55-60fps at 1920x1200 with enabled 4x FSAA. Both versions of the new card from Nvidia are slower than 55fps at 1600x1200 but the game seems to be playable anyway.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

The game doesn’t support FSAA when you enable the dynamic lighting model, but loses much of its visual appeal with the static model. This is the reason why we benchmarked the cards in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. using anisotropic filtering only.

The ATI Radeon HD 2000 series still has serious problems in this game: the Radeon HD 2900 XT can’t provide a comfortable speed even at 1280x1024. This is not a problem for the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT, though, as it makes the resolution of 1600x1200 playable as well (its minimum speed is never lower than 25fps). The reference and pre-overclocked versions of the card are 25% and almost 40% ahead of the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB!

The overclocking is most beneficial at 1280x1024 where the frequency of the shader processors affects the performance most while the influence of the memory subsystem is minimal. Here, it is about 17% at first and then lowers to 11% at 1600x1200 and to 9% at 1920x1200.