The NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GS: A Closer Look

Test Setup

We already had a look at how the 7900 GS performs relative to several other cards currently on the market from both ATI and NVIDIA. Today we will be looking at how well these individual 7900 GSs perform relative to each other, and we've thrown in a couple of other cards from NVIDIA and ATI for reference. From NVIDIA, we included the reference 7800 GT and the 7900 GT, and from ATI, the X1900 GT and the X1800 GTO.

We tested three different games at three different resolutions to give us a general idea of performance. The games we tested were Battlefield 2, Half-Life2:Episode One, and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. We tested each of these games at 1024x768, 1280x1024, and 1600x1200 with graphics quality settings on high in each game whenever possible.

This is the system we used for testing:

CPU:	Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (2.93GHz/4MB)
Motherboard:	Intel D975XBX (LGA-775) ASUS P5NSLI
Chipset:	Intel 975X NVIDIA nForce 570 SLI
Chipset Drivers:	Intel 7.2.2.1007 (Intel) NVIDIA nForce 8.22
Hard Disk:	Seagate 7200.7 160GB SATA
Memory:	Corsair XMS2 DDR2-800 4-4-4-12 (1GB x 2)
Video Card:	Various
Video Drivers:	ATI Catalyst 6.8 NVIDIA ForceWare 91.47
Desktop Resolution:	1920 x 1440 - 32-bit @ 60Hz
OS:	Windows XP Professional SP2

*Note that sound was disabled for testing.

Battlefield 2

We start our performance tests by looking at Battlefield 2, one of our standard game benchmarks. This benchmark is basically a running game demo following several players in different vehicles (including a jet) and on foot in third-person view. This gives us samples from different perspectives in the game and provides a good overview of the performance in Battlefield 2. Detail settings are on "High" for testing.



The five 7900 GS samples we have here offer a good representation of the performance potential this card has with different factory overclocks from card manufacturers. The "out of the box" performance of the 7900 GS will vary more or less depending on the game between different card versions. In Battlefield2, we see a significant difference between performance between the slowest 7900 GS (the Albatron GeForce 7900 GS) which is clocked at reference speeds, and the higher clocked BFG GeForce 7900 GS OC. At 1600x1200 resolution, there is a 17.5% framerate increase with the overclocked BFG 7900 GS, which could definitely be a noticeable improvement during gameplay.

Also, we can see how at reference speeds, the 7900 GS gets lower framerates than the reference 7900 GT, but most of our factory overclocked 7900 GS cards match or surpass the performance of the 7900 GT in each resolution. This is important considering that the 7900 GT generally costs around $100 more than the 7900 GS. Keep in mind however, that the 7900 GT has potential for overclocking as well, and its performance potential will exceed that of the 7900 GS depending on the specific card and application.

Something else we see that is particularly noteworthy here and in the other game tests is how ATI's X1900 GT compares to these 7900 GS cards in performance. The 7900 GS at reference speeds doesn't perform as well as the X1900 GT; for example, at 1024x768 the Albatron 7900 GS gets a framerate of 105.9 FPS verses the X1900 GT's 111.1 FPS. But as we saw in the previous example, our Leadtek and BFG 7900 GS samples get higher performance with their factory overclocks, which is of interest given these cards are in direct competition with each other.