NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 (G80): GPUs Re-architected for DirectX 10
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on November 8, 2006 6:01 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
AA Disabled Performance
Up to this point, most of our benchmarks have been run with 4xAA, as we feel most people considering something like the new 8800 GTX are going to be interested in image quality as well as performance. If you don't care about antialiasing, the need for such fast graphics cards trails off quickly, as you'll see here.
The 8800 GTX SLI still has issues with Battlefield 2, but more importantly you see the clustering of all of the high-end graphics configurations once antialiasing is disabled. Discounting the single ATI X1950 XTX and GeForce 7900 GTX cards, the spread among all the cards is about 20%-25%. Battlefield 2 is also clearly beginning to run into CPU limitations, with many of the cards showing very little in the way of performance drops when going from 1600x1200 to 1920x1440. When 8800 GTX SLI is fixed, we expect to see a more or less flat line throughout resolution scaling. Battlefield 2142 would once again be something nice to test, as frame rates are a bit lower with that title, but overall the Battlefield series has always been pretty demanding when it comes to CPU power (not to mention have enough memory).
With 4xAA, Episode One showed a bit more separation, and our particular demo seemed to be CPU limited to around 230 FPS. Disabling antialiasing shows that 230 FPS is indeed where our CPU tops out. The other cards move closer to this mark, but without dropping to a lower resolution none of them are yet able to reach it. With the minimum score coming in at 56 FPS, and even then only at 2560x1600, Half-Life 2: Episode One does not appear to really need anything faster in the GPU department just yet.
Disabling antialiasing in Prey improved performance in most of the tested configurations by about 20%, and the 8800 GTX SLI setup becomes a bit more CPU limited.. The relative positions of the cards don't really change much, although the GeForce 7 series cards appear to do slightly better without antialiasing compared to the ATI cards.
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yyrkoon - Thursday, November 9, 2006 - link
If you're using Firefox, get, and install the extension "flashblock". Just did this myself today, tired of all the *animated* adds bothering me while reading articles.Sorry AT guys, but we've had this discussion before, and its realy annoying.
JarredWalton - Thursday, November 9, 2006 - link
Do you want to be able for us to continue as a site? Because ads support us. Anyway, his problem is related to not seeing images, so your comment about blocking ads via flashblock is completely off topic.yyrkoon - Thursday, November 9, 2006 - link
Of course I want you guys to continue on as a site, just wish it were possible without annoying flashing adds in a section where I'm trying to concentrate on the article.As for the off topic part, yeah, my bad, I mis-read the full post (bad habit). Feel free to edit or remove that post of mine :)
archcommus - Thursday, November 9, 2006 - link
What browser are you using?falc0ne - Thursday, November 9, 2006 - link
firefox 2.0JarredWalton - Thursday, November 9, 2006 - link
If Firefox, I know there's an option to block images not on the originating website. In this case, images come from image.anandtech.com while the article is on www.anandtech.com, so that my be the cause of your problems. IE7 and other browsers might have something similar, though I haven't ever looked. Other than that, perhaps some firewall or ad blocking software is to blame - it might be getting false positives?archcommus - Thursday, November 9, 2006 - link
Wow to Anandtech - another amazing, incredibly in-depth article. It is so obvious this site is run by dedicated professionals who have degrees in these fields versus most other review sites where the authors just take pictures of the product and run some benches. Articles like this keep the AT reader base very very strong.Also wow to the G80, obviously an amazing card. My question, is 450W the PSU requirement for the GTX only or for both the GTX and GTS? I ask because I currently have a 400W PSU and am wondering if it will be sufficient for next-gen DX10 class hardware, and I know I would not be buying the highest model card. I also only have one HDD and one optical drive in my system.
Yet another wow goes out to the R&D monetary investment - $475 million! It's amazing that that amount is even acceptable to nVidia, I can't believe the sales of such a high end, enthusiast-targeted card are great enough to warrant that.
JarredWalton - Thursday, November 9, 2006 - link
Sales of the lower end parts which will be based off G80 are what make it worthwhile, I would guess. As for PSU, I think that 450W is for the GTX, and more is probably a safe bet (550W would be in line with a high-end system these days, although 400W ought to suffice if it's a good quality 400W). You can see that the GTX tops out at just under 300W average system power draw with an X6800, so if you use an E6600 and don't overclock, a decent 400W ought to work. The GTX tops out around 260W average with the X6800, so theoretically even a decent 350W will work fine. Just remember to upgrade the PSU if you ever add other components.photoguy99 - Thursday, November 9, 2006 - link
I just wanted to second that thought -AT articles have incredible quality and depth at this point - you guys are doing great work.
It's actually getting embarrasing for some of your competing sites, I browsed the Tom's article and it had so much fluff and retread I had to stop.
Please don't forget the effort is noticed and appreciated.
shabby - Wednesday, November 8, 2006 - link
It wasnt mentioned in the review, but whats the purpose of the 2nd sli connector?