Power Within Reach: NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB
by Derek Wilson on February 12, 2007 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Quake 4 Performance
This is the only OpenGL title on our list, which is much of the reason we keep using this benchmark. Based on id Software's Doom 3 engine, Quake 4 creates an intense atmosphere through the use of excellent lighting and shadows. Ultra Mode is used, enabling uncompressed texture and normal maps, which has a large impact on the memory subsystem of the graphics card. Our test is a timedemo based on a recording of the first minute of play in the game. The 1.3 patch has been applied, and SMP support has been enabled.
It seems that enabling Ultra Mode in Quake 4 has a huge impact on the 8800 GTS 320MB. Using uncompressed data eats up memory very quickly, and this causes problems for the memory limited card. This time, the score of the 8800 GTS 320MB matches up with the two other lower memory parts we tested, but it is difficult to tell whether this is a Quake 4 issue or a hardware/driver issue.
Interestingly, performance on the 8800 GTS 320MB doesn't fall as much moving from no AA to 4xAA as it has under other games. In spite of this, most of the cards are still faster than the new GTS with 4xAA enabled. Resolution scaling under 4xAA is similar between most of the cards, but unfortunately we were unable to test AA at 2560x1600, as we had some stability issues with Quake 4 at that resolution with Ultra Mode enabled.
This is the only OpenGL title on our list, which is much of the reason we keep using this benchmark. Based on id Software's Doom 3 engine, Quake 4 creates an intense atmosphere through the use of excellent lighting and shadows. Ultra Mode is used, enabling uncompressed texture and normal maps, which has a large impact on the memory subsystem of the graphics card. Our test is a timedemo based on a recording of the first minute of play in the game. The 1.3 patch has been applied, and SMP support has been enabled.
It seems that enabling Ultra Mode in Quake 4 has a huge impact on the 8800 GTS 320MB. Using uncompressed data eats up memory very quickly, and this causes problems for the memory limited card. This time, the score of the 8800 GTS 320MB matches up with the two other lower memory parts we tested, but it is difficult to tell whether this is a Quake 4 issue or a hardware/driver issue.
Interestingly, performance on the 8800 GTS 320MB doesn't fall as much moving from no AA to 4xAA as it has under other games. In spite of this, most of the cards are still faster than the new GTS with 4xAA enabled. Resolution scaling under 4xAA is similar between most of the cards, but unfortunately we were unable to test AA at 2560x1600, as we had some stability issues with Quake 4 at that resolution with Ultra Mode enabled.
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nicolasb - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
The conclusion to this article:This conclusion does not seem to bear much resemblance to the actual observations. In virtually every case the card performed well without AA, but dismally as soon as 4xAA was switched on. A fair conclusion would be to recommend the card for resolutions up to 1920x1200 without AA, but definitely not with.
DerekWilson - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
The GTS 320MB still performs well if taken on its own at 19x12 with 4xAA ... But I will modify the comment to better reflect what I mean.nicolasb - Tuesday, February 13, 2007 - link
The way the conclusion now reads is a big improvement, IMNSHO. :-)munky - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
I was expecting better performance with AA enabled, and the article just glossed over the fact that the in half the games with AA the card performed on par or worse than last gen card that cost less.Bob Markinson - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
For the base Oblivion install, yes, it's not so much of a memory hog. In-game texture use usually doesn't exceed 256 MB with HDR and 4xAA on @ 1152x864. (Also, please test AA perf too with HDR, both ATI and Nvidia do support it on their current gen cards at the same time.)Most popular texture mods will bring up the memory usage north of 500 MB. I've seen it hit over 700 MB. Thus, there's a good chance that any 256 MB card would be crippled with texture swapping. I should know, mine is.
Bob Markinson - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
For the base Oblivion install, yes, it's not so much of a memory hog. In-game texture use usually doesn't exceed 256 MB with HDR and 4xAA on @ 1152x864. (Also, please test AA perf too with HDR, both ATI and Nvidia do support it on their current gen cards at the same time.)Most popular texture mods will bring up the memory usage north of 500 MB. I've seen it hit over 700 MB. Thus, there's a good chance that any 256 MB card would be crippled with texture swapping. I should know, mine is.
DerekWilson - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
What texture mod would you recommend we test with?Bob Markinson - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
Qarl's Texture Pack 2 and 3 are quite popular world texture packs. Please check this site for more details:http://devnull.devakm.googlepages.com/totoworld">http://devnull.devakm.googlepages.com/totoworld
Note that version 3 really does need a lot of texture memory. Also, check out Qarl's 4096 compressed landscape LOD normal map texture pack, it'll add far more depth than the plain, overly filtered Oblivion LOD textures.
DerekWilson - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
We will take a look at those texture packs and do some testing ...Hopefully we can provide a follow up further exploring the impact of memory on the 8800 architecture.
blackbrrd - Monday, February 12, 2007 - link
I looked at the Oblivion scores, and the first thing that hit me was: they are using the standard crappy looking textures!No oblivion fan running a 8800gts would run with the standard texture pack. It is, at times, really really bad.
Running a texture pack like the one above is quite normal. If you have enough video card memory there isn't much of a slowdown - except when the data is loaded into memory - which happends all the time... It does make the game look nicer though!