NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX 512: More Than Just More Memory
by Derek Wilson on November 14, 2005 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Battlefield 2 Performance
Battlefield 2 is still one of the best (and best looking) of the games to come out over the past six months. Popular with just about everyone who can stand to play a first person shooter, and stressful on hardware at the same time, Battlefield 2 is an important game on our list of tests. We use a custom demo and the DICE supplied demo.cmd (modified to suit our needs) in order to benchmark this game. We also manually compute the average framerate based on the useful frames in timedemo_frametimes file rather than relying on the (flawed) summary output. Unfortunately we seem to have some problems testing SLI using this setup, so we have omitted SLI results for this title.
As we can see in our tests without AA, the 7800 GTX is locked in a dead heat with the X1800 XT, and the 7800 GTX 512 simply dominates both by more than 30%. This is a huge win for NVIDIA's new part given the popularity of this game.
Battlefield 2 is still one of the best (and best looking) of the games to come out over the past six months. Popular with just about everyone who can stand to play a first person shooter, and stressful on hardware at the same time, Battlefield 2 is an important game on our list of tests. We use a custom demo and the DICE supplied demo.cmd (modified to suit our needs) in order to benchmark this game. We also manually compute the average framerate based on the useful frames in timedemo_frametimes file rather than relying on the (flawed) summary output. Unfortunately we seem to have some problems testing SLI using this setup, so we have omitted SLI results for this title.
As we can see in our tests without AA, the 7800 GTX is locked in a dead heat with the X1800 XT, and the 7800 GTX 512 simply dominates both by more than 30%. This is a huge win for NVIDIA's new part given the popularity of this game.
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Ryan Smith - Monday, November 14, 2005 - link
Actually, we were hoping to bring you CoD2 benchmarks for this review, but it didn't pan out. We do not equip our video testbeds with sound cards, so that we can more accurately compare cards; the problem with this is that we could not get CoD2 to run without sound, and we ran out of time unable to find a solution. It's still something we'd like to benchmark in the future if we get the chance though.ElFenix - Monday, November 14, 2005 - link
then benchmark it with sound and disclose that fact...yacoub - Monday, November 14, 2005 - link
Ditch DoD:Source for CoD2.Ditch DOOM3 for Quake4.
Rename FEAR.EXE to anything else .exe (PHEAR.EXE, TEST.EXE, whatever) when benchmarking ATI cards if you're running any of the latest ATI driver sets since they have yet to fix a faulty "IF" code from the FEAR demo that is hindering performance in the full version game. (The fix did not make the latest driver release earlier this week.) It has shown to improve performance by as much as 15fps.
xbdestroya - Monday, November 14, 2005 - link
I don't know about that FEAR 'fix' though. I mean how many card owners/PC users will actually know to do that? I think it's more legit to leave the bug in the testing - it is a legitimate bug afterall - and wait for the new Catalyst release where it will be 'fixed' and show the increased performance. Or if that's too strong against ATI, publish an article with benchmarks in FEAR highlighting that bug. But for standard comparisson benchmarks, I think it's best if they're done in as much of an 'out-of-the-box,' load it and play situation as possible.tfranzese - Monday, November 14, 2005 - link
I disagree with the 'out-of-box' notion. A product can't ship as a turd, but this is an enthusiast site. Enthusiasts should have the knowledge to use the proper drivers (not always the latest, which is why I say proper).xbdestroya - Monday, November 14, 2005 - link
Well but has this site even published anythign on that fix? Not to my knowledge. I only know abotu it because I'm on the B3D forums where it originated. I imagine that whoever knows it here knows about it from the AT forums. But the fact is that if you're going to include the 'fix' in benchmarks, you might as well have an article preceding it announcing that this fix even exists, don't you think? Not everyone's a forum-goer; I know there was a time once not-too-long ago were I just went to tech sites and rad the articles, not the forums.First the article describing this fix to the masses - *then* the banchmarks incorporating it. Don't you think that makes sense?
xbdestroya - Monday, November 14, 2005 - link
I wish these posts could be edited after the fact, but alas they can not. Anyway sorry for the bad spelling above.Basically though, if we're talking about 'enthusiast' sites, the sites should be publishing 'enthusiast' news like the fear.exe fix, right? Then after that article I could agree with it's inclusion in benchmarks, because a precedent has been established.
ElFenix - Monday, November 14, 2005 - link
or they could just write a blurb in the article, when they do the fear benches, that you can rename fear to anything else and fix the problem. and then bench it both ways.xbdestroya - Monday, November 14, 2005 - link
Seriously though, it deserves it's own article. If it doesn't deserve that, it doesn't deserve benches mixed in with a 'general' comparison. The vast majority of people don't even read the associated text with benchmarks anyway, so it would probably go unnoticed by quite a few if it just had a short explanation on the FEAR page of a banchmark round-up.yacoub - Monday, November 14, 2005 - link
LAAAAAAAAAAAAAAME. Start doing REAL tests. Okay fine, this is your last PEAK FPS test, right? Right?
From now on show us average fps, sound on, etc. What we'll ACTUALLY GET using the card to PLAY the game, not dick-measure it.