NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT (G92)

Part 3: Performance in Games

Serious Sam II (HDR)

Test result charts: SS2 (HDR)

This game sticks to the old ways with lots of textures. So it depends much on the speed and number of texture units and ROPs (although shader units are also important). That's why the new product is outperformed not only by the 8800GTX. It's also a tad slower than the 8800GTS. Considering that overclocking does not yield much to Zotac here, the situation with the BFG card will be identical.

Prey

Test result charts: Prey

It's almost a similar situation. Cut-down performance of texture units (as the number of TMUs is increased, they have become more primitive) makes the new cards slower in old games, especially OGL, than the old cards, if the latter have higher resources as far as memory bandwidth, TMU, and other aspects are concerned.

3DMark05: MARKS

Test result charts: 3DMark05 MARKS

As soon as we start a test that depends on shader units, the new cards shoot forward. This test proves this fact.

3DMark06: SHADER 2.0 MARKS

Test result charts: 3DMark06 SM2.0 MARKS

A similar situation.

3DMark06: SHADER 3.0 MARKS

Test result charts: 3DMark06 SM3.0 MARKS

You can see that all three 3DMark tests give similar results.

Conclusions

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT (G92) 512MB PCI-E demonstrates phenomenal results almost in all tests! We've never come across a situation, when a cheaper card outperforms more expensive products, which are still available in stores and are not discontinued. NVIDIA has done an impossible thing: it "killed" the 8800GTS (both modifications) and the 8800GTX with one stone. Who will want to pay $600 for the GTX card, if you can buy a $300 card, which can come close to the flagship in a number of tests!

To say nothing of the RADEON HD 2900XT, which is outperformed by the new card in every respect! And which consumes much more power, has bigger dimensions, and is much noisier.

But there is still a fly in the ointment. We speak about CRYSIS. Yep, about those optimizations, because of which reflections on the water are not drawn each frame. It spoils the overall impression, although it appears only in DX10 Very High mode. As if the developers were desperate to accelerate the game. And they did it haphazardly.

When the article was ready to be published, we received information from BFG Russia that NVIDIA promised to fix all problems in CRYSIS in the official release of drivers by the time the game comes out officially.

As of the card itself, high heat dissipation is its big drawback. It's strange to see a graphics card manufactured by the new process technology to dissipate so much heat. Theoretically, we should have seen something of the 7800GTX-7900GTX transition effect: much higher clock rates, and much lower heat release. NVIDIA apparently made a mistake somewhere. The same concerns the cooler. Such a card must be equipped with a cooling system that blows the hot air out of a system unit. Not just stirs the hot air inside.

As a result, the 8800GT has another drawback - a noisy cooling system. NVIDIA again chose a wrong cooler. Remember the 7900GTX and its excellent two-slot quiet cooler! Yep, it occupied two slots. But it was very quiet. Why discard old good solutions and install narrow coolers, if users will have to solve the problem of noise? A two-slot cooler is not a drawback anymore. In 95% of cases a PCI-Ex16 slot is followed by a PCI-Ex1, and there are almost no expansion cards for this slot in the market. So it can be safely blocked by a graphics card's cooler. Besides, there are noiseless narrow coolers as well. For example, a cooling system from Zotac. An excellent solution! The same dimensions, but the fan rotates at 800 rpm, there is no noise. Cooling efficiency is higher, because the card is overclocked. Why couldn't NVIDIA use the same solution? It's no secret that all 8800 cards are sold by NVIDIA to its partners. They do not manufacture cards on their own. So 80% of the cards will be equipped with the reference cooling system installed by NVIDIA's orders. They won't change the cooler. And users will have to suffer from noise. That's not right.

So we should praise Zotac for such a good solution and for their card in general, which is faster than the 8800GTX in some cases. We'd like to mention the nice looking box as well. By the way, this cooler is also illuminated with orange LEDs.

What concerns the BFG product, it has all cooling problems of the card from Forsa (reference card), but also features a great advantage - higher frequencies (not much higher, though). The cooler has a sticker that glows in ultraviolet light. The box is dull and looks as if it was designed in a hurry. The company used to offer more attractive designs. But box dimensions are very convenient for retailers.

Here goes the main conclusion. The 8800 GT "killed" the 8800GTS. Overclocked modifications of the new card are even better than the 8800 GTX, because the price of the new card is much lower than those for the above mentioned competitors. The 8800 GT also sent the 2900 XT to retirement. Conclusion: either the 8800GTS/GTX will disappear soon, or their prices will drop. Just like for the 2900 XT.

Users will benefit either way. Good news, everyone!

And another thing that we are not tired to repeat from article to article. Having decided to choose a graphics card by yourself, you have to realize you're to change one of the fundamental PC parts, which might require additional tuning to improve performance or enable some qualitative features. This is not a finished product, but a component part. So, you must understand that in order to get the most from a new graphics card, you will have to acquire some basic knowledge of 3D graphics and graphics in general. If you are not ready for this, you should not perform upgrades by yourself. In this case it would be better to purchase a ready chassis with preset software (along with vendor's technical support,) or a gaming console that doesn't require any adjustments.

To find more information regarding the current graphics card market and the performance of various cards, feel free to read our monthly special 3Digest.

The following card gets the Original Design award (November):

ZOTAC GeForce 8800 GT (G92) AMP Edition 512MB PCI-E

PSU kindly provided by TAGAN

The Dell 3007WFP monitor kindly provided by NVIDIA