Nvidia Tightens Up Midrange Performance With The $300 GeForce 7950GT

F.E.A.R

F.E.A.R. is generally a title that Nvidia based cards do well in. Once again we see the reference design GeForce 7950GT is slightly behind the factory overclocked XFX GeForce 7900GT 550M.

Oblivion

We use Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion as the ultimate torture test; the only settings we don't maximize are HDR and soft shadows. We disable HDR due to the fact that Nvidia cannot render HDR with antialiasing - ATI cannot either without the "Chuck patch" - and we disable soft shadows because they don't appear correctly; shadows from the back of a character's head can cast a shadow that can be seen on their face. This can make the women appear to have beards.

In our outdoor scene there are long lines of sight, day is changing into night, and there is foliage swaying in the breeze. This has a severe impact on performance, which is where raw horsepower can muscle its way through this test. That is exactly what the GeForce 7950GX2 can do: chew through. While none of the cards are "playable" (meaning that they average 30 frames per second or more) at anything higher that 1024x768, it demonstrates how well the future of games with many moving objects and techniques could be.

One place we did see an advantage was in Oblivion, where the lower resolution scores were dominated by the GeForce 7900GT. However, we saw that the GeForce 7950GT was able to complete the 2560x1600, test unlike the GeForce 7900GT.