X-bit labs

Two for One: Nvidia's Dual-Chip GeForce 7950 GX2 Reviewed (page 9)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov

[ 06/09/2006 | 06:01 PM ]

Testbed and Methods

Unlike the situation with Quad-SLI, when we had very little time at our disposal (for details see our article called Quadtet: Nvidia GeForce 7900 Quad SLI Performance Unveiled), today we had all the time we needed to perform the full set of benchmarks on the Nvidia GeForce 7950 GX2.For our test session we used the following platform:

• AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 CPU (2 x 2.60GHz, 2x1MB L2 cache)
• ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe mainboard (Nvidia nForce4 SLI X16 chipset) for Nvidia GeForce graphics cards
• ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe mainboard (ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 chipset) for ATI Radeon graphics cards
• OCZ PC3200 Platinum EL DDR SDRAM (2 x 1GB, CL2-3-2-5)
• Maxtor MaXLine III 7B250S0 hard disk drive (Serial ATA-150, 16MB buffer)
• Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 sound card
• Enermax Liberty 620W power supply (ELT620AWT, 620W)
• Dell P1130 and Dell P1110 monitors (21”, 1800x1440@75Hz max display mode)
• Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2 with DirectX 9.0c
• ATI Catalyst 6.5
• Nvidia ForceWare 91.29 Release Candidate (for GeForce 7950 GX2), Nvidia ForceWare 84.21 (for all other Nvidia GeForce graphics cards)

We set up the ATI and Nvidia drivers in the same way as always:

ATI Catalyst:

• Catalyst A.I.: Standard
• Mipmap Detail Level: Quality
• Wait for vertical refresh: Always off
• Adaptive antialiasing: Off
• Temporal antialiasing: Off
• Quality AF: Off
• Other settings: default

Nvidia ForceWare:

• Image Settings: Quality
• Vertical sync: Off
• Trilinear optimization: On
• Anisotropic mip filter optimization: Off
• Anisotropic sample optimization: On
• Gamma correct antialiasing: On
• Transparency antialiasing: Off
• Other settings: default

We selected the highest graphics quality settings in each game, identical for graphics cards from ATI and Nvidia. We did not edit the configuration files of the games. To measure the performance we either used the integrated tools of the games we tested in, or if there were none available, resorted to FRAPS utility. If it was possible, we measured minimal performance as well.

To load the video subsystem to the full extent and to minimize the influence of the CPU speed on the performance results we didn’t test the systems in the “pure speed” mode. We only ran the tests in “eye candy” mode with full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. We also ran the tests in “extreme eye candy” mode with enabled SLI AA 8x/16x or Super AA 8x/14x.

We enabled FSAA and AF from the game if possible. Otherwise we forced the necessary mode from the ATI Catalyst and Nvidia ForceWare graphics card driver. The same settings were used for extreme full-screen anti-aliasing modes.

These games and applications were used as benchmarks:

First-Person 3D Shooters

• Battlefield 2
• The Chronicles of Riddick
• Call of Duty 2
• Doom III
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
• Far Cry
• F.E.A.R.
• Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter
• Half-Life 2
• Half-Life 2: Lost Coast
• Project Snowblind
• Quake 4
• Serious Sam 2

Third-Person 3D Shooters

• Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

Simulators

• Pacific Fighters
• X3: Reunion

Strategies

• Age of Empires 3
• Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War

Synthetic benchmarks

• Futuremark 3DMark05 build 1.2.0
• Futuremark 3DMark06 build 1.0.2

Since Nvidia GeForce 7950 GX2 is a dual-chip solution, we will compare it not only against the highest-performing single graphics cards such as ATI Radeon X1900 XTX and Nvidia GeForce 7900 GTX, but also against the corresponding CrossFire and SLI tandems.