The Fastest 3D Cards Go Head-To-Head
Is The Upgrade Worthwhile?
Between the praise heaped on the new graphics chips, the hype surrounding the Radeon HD 4800-series following Nvidia’s GTX 200-series launch, and the rapid drop in price of many top cards means that many people are a little unsure of whether or not their cards are due for an upgrade. The following charts allow you to make a visual determination of the performance differences among the current 3D models.
The distribution of the charts consists of the game benchmark frame rates and the resolutions used. The distribution goes from right to left, increasing from 1280 to 1680 to 1920 pixels, followed by the resolutions in the same order but with anti-aliasing enabled. The height of the measured points is the frame rate achieved. In an ideal situation, you will have two peaks in sequence with a slope line that starts top left and drops down towards bottom right.
A change between the GeForce 8800 GTS 512 and 9800 GTX cannot be felt, as both cards use the G92 graphics chip, the same 256-bit memory connection, and nearly identical clock speeds.
The drop in price of the GeForce 8800 GTX means that the older G80 graphics chip is an alternative option again. The increases only make a difference with anti-aliasing at 1680x1050 pixels. In new games, the 8800 GTS 512 is often the better choice.
If you can’t make up your mind between the GeForce GTX 280 and GTX 260, here are the differences. First, Crysis shows slight increases, though the frame rate with a Core 2 CPU barely gets over 25 fps. Second, in Mass Effect, performance can be improved slightly, and the additional power of the GTX 280 should be visible in World in Conflict at higher resolutions. Finally, if you overclock the GTX 260 a little, or go for an MSI overclocked model, you can get closer to the GTX 280’s performance.
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San Pedro Looks like the results for SLI and Crossfire were switched with the single card results. . .Reply -
Duncan NZ Not a bad article, really comprehensive.Reply
My one complaint? Why use that CPU when you know that the test cards are going to max it out? Why not a quad core OC'ed to 4GHz? It'd give far more meaning to the SLI results. We don't want results that we can duplicate at home, we want results that show what these cards can do. Its a GPU card comparason, not a complain about not having a powerful enough CPU story.
Oh? And please get a native english speaker to give it the once over for spelling and grammar errors, although this one had far less then many articles posted lately. -
Lightnix It'd be a good article if you'd used a powerful enough CPU and up to date Radeon drivers (considering we're now up to 8.8 now), I mean are those even the 'hotfix' 8.6's or just the vanilla drivers?Reply -
elbert Version AMD Catalyst 8.6? Why not just say i'm using ATI drivers with little to no optimizations for the 4800's. This is why the CF benchmarks tanked.Reply -
at 1280, all of the highend cards were CPU limited. at that resolution, you need a 3.2-3.4 c2d to feed a 3870... this article had so much potential, and yet... so much work, so much testing, fast for nothing, because most of the results are very cpu limited (except 1920@AA).Reply
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wahdangun WTF, hd4850 SHOULD be a lot faster than 9600 GT and 8800 GT even tough they have 1Gig of ramReply -
mjam No 4870X2 and 1920 X 1200 max resolution tested. How about finishing the good start of an article with the rest of it...Reply -
I agree, the 4870 X2 should have been in there and should have used the updated drivers. Good article but I think you fell short on finishing it.Reply
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@pulasky - Rage much? It's called driver issues you dumbass. Some games are more optimised for multicard setups than others, and even then some favour SLi to Crossfire. And if you actually READ the article rather than let your shrinken libido get the better of you, you'll find that Crossfire does indeed work in CoD4.Reply
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