Test Setup
We included GT products from Nvidia to give a comparison of results. We also streamlined the tests we used just so people had a decent gauge without all of the extra pages to hunt through. One thing we will point out immediately is that the two cards have the same core, memory and clock speeds. They probably even came off the same production line. This means that the performance between the two should be identical.
| System Hardware | |
|---|---|
| Processor(s) | AMD Athlon 64 FX-602.6 GHz, 1.0 GHz Bus, 1 MB L2 cache |
| Platform | Asus AN832-SLI PremiumNVIDIA nForce4 SLI, BIOS version 1205 |
| RAM | Corsair CMX1024-4400Pro2x 1024 MB @ DDR400 (CL3.0-4-4-8) |
| Hard Drive | Western Digital Raptor, WD1500ADFD150 GB, 10,000 RPM, 16 MB Cache, SATA/150 |
| Networking | On-Board nForce4 Gigabit Ethernet |
| Graphics Cards | Sapphire Radeon X1900GT 256 MB GDDR3575 MHz Core600 MHz Memory (1.20 GHz DDR)PowerColor Radeon X1900GT 256 MB GDDR3575 MHz Core600 MHz Memory (1.20 GHz DDR)XFX GeForce 7900GT 256 MB GDDR3675 MHz Core815 MHz Memory (1.63 GHz DDR)EVGA GeForce 7800 GT 256 MB GDDR3445 MHz Core535 MHz Memory (1.07 GHz DDR)XFX GeForce 7600GT 256 MB GDDR3590 MHz Core800 MHz Memory (1.60 GHz DDR) |
| Power Supply | PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool 1,000W |
| System Software & Drivers | |
| OS | Microsoft Windows XP Professional 5.10.2600, Service Pack 2 |
| DirectX Version | 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904) |
| Platform Driver | nForce 6.70 |
| Graphics Driver(s) | NVIDIA - Forceware 84.21 WHQLATI - Catalyst 6.6 WHQL |
Benchmark Results
3DMark05
In 3DMark 2005 we see two things that immerge from the results. The first is that the Radeon X1900 GT cards are ahead in most of the resolutions, but not by much. At 1600x1200 the factory overclocked XFX GeForce 7900 GT pulls ahead but then gives it back up to the ATI Radeon X1900 GT cards. When the image quality is turned up, the XFX GeForce 7900 GT does the inverse of the previous. It takes the lead all the way through the tests except for resolutions of 1600x1200. This is where the power of extra pipelines comes into play. Interestingly, the XFX card has twice as many pipelines yet only pulls ahead by 4% at 1024x768 and less than 2% at 1280x1024. It is at 2048x1536 and 2560x1600 that the excess full processing pipelines shows 27% and 22% increases.
