X-bit labs

Sparkle SF-PX88GT256D3-HP Graphics Card: Is 256MB Enough? (page 7)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 02/28/2008 | 04:25 PM ]

Performance in First-Person 3D Shooters

Battlefield 2142

This game doesn’t support display resolutions of 16:10 format, so we use a resolution of 1920x1440 pixels (4:3 format) instead of 1920x1200 for it.

This traditional opener of our test program says that the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT 256MB doesn’t feel a lack of graphics memory. It delivers high performance at resolutions up to 1600x1200 and good performance (for its class) at 1920x1400. The card is roughly equal to the ATI Radeon HD 3870 although has a high minimum of speed at low resolutions. The memory frequency becomes an important factor starting from the 1600x1200 mode, and the overclocking provides a considerable performance boost, over 20% at 1920x1440.

BioShock

BioShock doesn’t support FSAA when running in Windows Vista’s DirectX 10 environment. That’s why we benchmarked the cards without FSAA.

There is no shortage of graphics memory in BioShock because there is no FSAA. The Sparkle GeForce 8800 GT 256MB is far faster than the ATI Radeon HD 3870 and becomes as fast as the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB when overclocked (except that it has a somewhat lower minimum speed then).