NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX 512: More Than Just More Memory
by Derek Wilson on November 14, 2005 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Black & White 2 Performance
Black & White 2 is one of the most graphically taxing games to come out lately. This game is just as much fun as its predecessor and looks amazing to boot. This game features many cutting edge graphical effects like depth of field and HDR. Because of the aggressive nature with which Lionhead attacked graphics in Black & White 2, MSAA (Multisample Antialiasing) couldn't be employed. But due to the vibrant and high contrast nature of the game, FSAA can have a big impact on visual quality. In order to make up for the lack of MSAA support, Lionhead implemented SSAA (Supersample Antialiasing) in their game. While SSAA can trash performance on low-end to midrange hardware (even at modest resolutions), high performance cards can generally handle it.
Playability with Black & White 2 extends down to around 20 fps. The fast paced responsiveness required by an FPS is not really needed here, but dropping below 20 fps can cramp your style when you're trying to hurl boulders or fireballs at enemy troops. It is clear the SLI has a good impact on performance, and the 7800 GTX 512 maintains incredible framerates (for B&W2 with all the settings at their highest level).
Black & White 2 is one of the most graphically taxing games to come out lately. This game is just as much fun as its predecessor and looks amazing to boot. This game features many cutting edge graphical effects like depth of field and HDR. Because of the aggressive nature with which Lionhead attacked graphics in Black & White 2, MSAA (Multisample Antialiasing) couldn't be employed. But due to the vibrant and high contrast nature of the game, FSAA can have a big impact on visual quality. In order to make up for the lack of MSAA support, Lionhead implemented SSAA (Supersample Antialiasing) in their game. While SSAA can trash performance on low-end to midrange hardware (even at modest resolutions), high performance cards can generally handle it.
Playability with Black & White 2 extends down to around 20 fps. The fast paced responsiveness required by an FPS is not really needed here, but dropping below 20 fps can cramp your style when you're trying to hurl boulders or fireballs at enemy troops. It is clear the SLI has a good impact on performance, and the 7800 GTX 512 maintains incredible framerates (for B&W2 with all the settings at their highest level).
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ViRGE - Monday, November 14, 2005 - link
AFAIK 4xAA is the last level of AA that's constant between ATI and NV. The X850 tops out at 6xAA(which NV doesn't have), then there's 8xS, and the list goes on...Griswold - Monday, November 14, 2005 - link
Thats a beast no less. The only thing ATI can do now is kick off that mysterious R580 and it better have a few more pipes than the 520 at the same or even higher clock speeds - and no paperlaunch this time. Or just give up and get the launch right for the next generation...Is there any particular reason for only showing nvidia SLI results and no crossfire numbers at all?
Ryan Smith - Monday, November 14, 2005 - link
This is something we discussed when working on this article, and there's really no purpose in testing a Crossfire setup at this point. The X1800 Crossfire master cards are not available yet to test an X1800 setup, and as we noted in our X850 Crossfire review, an X850 setup isn't really viable(not to mention it tops out at 1600x1200 when we test 2 higher resolutions).Griswold - Monday, November 14, 2005 - link
Ah well, woulda thought AT has a few master cards in their closet. Guess not. :)Kyanzes - Monday, November 14, 2005 - link
ONE WORD: DOMINATIONyacoub - Monday, November 14, 2005 - link
Very interesting to see that 512MB has little to no impact on the performance - it is instead almost entirely the clock speed of the GPU and the RAM that makes the difference.Also, I think this is the first time in PC gaming history where I've seen testing done where video cards more than ~9 months old are all essentially 'obsolete' as far as performance. Even the 7800 GT which only even came out maybe six months ago is already near the bottom of the stack at these 1600x1200 tests, and considering that's what anyone with a 19" or greater LCD wants to ideally play at, that's a bit scary. Then you realize that the 7800GT is around $330 for that bottom-end performance and it just goes up from there. It's really $450-550 for solid performance at that resolution these days. That's disappointing.
ElFenix - Monday, November 14, 2005 - link
no one with a 19" desktop LCD is playing a game at any higher than 1280x1024, in which case this card is basically a waste of money. i have a 20" widescreen lcd and i find myself playing in 1280x1024 a lot because the games often don't expand the field of view, rather they just narrow the screen vertically.tfranzese - Monday, November 14, 2005 - link
SLi/XFire scews the graphes. You need to take that into account when looking at the results.Cygni - Monday, November 14, 2005 - link
We have seen this in every successive generation of video cards. Unless your running AA at high res (ie over 1280x1024), RAM size has little impact on performance. Heck, 64mb is probably enough for the textures in most games.cw42 - Monday, November 14, 2005 - link
You really should have included COD2 in the tests. I remember seeing a test on another site that showed COD2 benefited GREATLY from 512mb vs 256mb of ram.