X-bit labs

Sparkle SF-PX88GT256D3-HP Graphics Card: Is 256MB Enough? (page 9)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko

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

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.

The application is far more demanding even among other DirectX 10 projects. It refers to the graphics memory as well. 512 megabytes of the bare minimum for Crysis, and the low results of the Sparkle GeForce 8800 GT 256MB are not surprising at all. The overclocking brings about no visible effect because it is indeed the memory amount that limits the card’s performance here.

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.

Using MegaTexture technology, Quake Wars appreciates large amounts of graphics memory. 256MB should be enough for low resolutions, but the GeForce 8800 GT 256MB suffers from inefficient memory management again. The overclocking helps improve the performance at 1280x1024 but is virtually useless at the higher resolutions. The ATI Radeon HD 3850 can run the game normally at 1600x1200 but the Sparkle card is limited to 1280x1024.