Lloyd Ketchum - YAB, "Yet Another Blog"

By Byron Hinson, Activewin.com March 26th, 2008

I have to admit that I have been a stalwart fan of ATI's cards for sometime so doing this review of an nVidia based card that I have been sent from Liberating Technologies seems a little strange. ATI had long been the best card maker for some years before nVidia hit a home run with the 8000 series GPU's and this is our first full nVidia based review on this site so we will go into full details about this 8800 GTX, how well it runs games and just what benefit it will give Windows Vista users even on moderate PC's.

So let us take a closer look at the GeForce 8800 GTX card - take note that all of our benchmarks will be done at stock speeds with the retail heatsink on the card, nothing has been changed or played around with. We are also using the latest drivers available on nVidia's site to make sure that we are as up to date as we can be in regards to getting the best out of the card on Windows Vista. For all our tests we are running on the following PC specs:

• Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Slipstream
• Intel Quad Core Processor Q6600 G0 @ 2.4 GHz/AMD X2 6000+ Dual Core Processor
• Asus P5E Motherboard/Asus M2V Socket AM2 Motherboard
• 8 GB DDR 2 Memory
• 500 GB Hard Drive
• Samsung Monitor

As you can see we are comparing the graphics card running on both the new Intel Q6600 G0 processor and on AMD's 6000+ Dual Core processor to get a good comparison based on the kind of chips that many users today will have inside their computers. The two motherboards both run the PCI Express Card at 16x speed and each board has the same memory installed on it.

So where do we start? Well first the installation was a breeze on the new Intel System setup I now have running for our review machine. The card worked right away on the Intel Asus P5E motherboard with no need to change any settings at all, to make sure everything was clean - we did a full clean install of Windows Vista with Service Pack 1 integrated (thanks Microsoft!). The card was detected right away and it was a simple case of installing the nVidia drivers and we were ready to go right away.

While most reviews of graphics card will only ever cover gaming and some other applications we like to make sure that our reviews cover how good the performance is in Windows Vista, this means judging how fast windows are drawn, how smooth the experience is etc and I am pleased to say that compared to my previous ATI card everything is super smooth. The Windows Experience rating for the card is 5.9 as I would expect for a DirectX 10 based card. While I find the Windows Experience rating good for some things, I find it doesn't offer enough when judging graphics card because an ATI X2900 can score the same as the nVidia 8800 GTX yet the cards offer a massive difference in speed between them.

So how does Windows Vista feel with an nVidia card? Well my view is that nVidia offer the best Vista experience right now, in both driver terms and for ease of use. The card also is quiet which makes a world of difference when you are simply working in Windows Vista rather than playing games, where as the ATI Fans on the X2900 sometimes make you feel that an airplane is flying by your window. Movement of Windows in Vista is smoother on the nVidia card compared to the ATI one, whether this is just due to improved Vista drivers or the card itself is hard to say but for myself it is an easy thing to notice.

Comparing the nVidia GeForce 8800 GTX on both the AMD and Intel platforms was an easier case altogether, while you would expect the Intel Q6600 Quad to outdo the AMD 6000+ Dual Core - it was far more of a win for Intel that I thought it would be. The Intel system ran everything more stable than the AMD platform - this is most likely due to the motherboards but both were Asus boards using exactly the same components and the latest bios updates but things were far snappier on the Intel system than the AMD one and everything was far more stable in terms of sleep modes and gaming experience even on games that don't make use of the Quad Core Intel chip.

Although we have not shown any overclocking benchmarks on this review I'm pleased to state that the GeForce 8800 GTX overclocks pretty well, even up to "Ultra" standard if you have decent cooling inside your PC. As I say, if you are going to overclock the card, make sure you have decent cooling and space behind your PC to let the air in and out, you really don't want to fry such an expensive card just after you have got it!

Drivers for the nVidia card are not quite as advanced as the ATI ones are right now for Windows Vista- but the game profiles that nVidia have for players to play around with are far better than anything ATI has to offer, they also don't ship with as much rubbish as the ATI ones have done lately. Although I have to say I'd like to see more regular releases from nVidia on their website.

Benchmarks

Gears of War DX9 (1680x1050 Full Detail Highest Settings)

Gears of War DX10 (1680x1050 Full Detail Highest Settings) Average Frame Rate

Gears of War on the PC is an excellent conversion of the Xbox 360 classic, not only does is manage to play better on the PC thanks to the mouse and keyboard combination, it is one of the few conversions in which a console to PC version looks fantastic even a year after the original release. Thanks to the Unreal Engine 3 - the detail and quality on show in Gears of War is superb. As you can see once again the benefit of playing the game on DirectX 9 is almost 20 more frames per second is some cases, although thanks to the GeForce 8800 GTX the game is once again fully playable even in DirectX 10 mode with 4xAA.

Everquest 2 (Extreme Detail 1680x1050) Average Frame Rate

E verquest 2 isn't the sort of game that tends to make most benchmarks, but the reason I've done this is that a few years ago no PC could run the game in Extreme detail, now with the GeForce 8800 GTX it runs perfectly and despite being 3 or 4 years old, it looks great for a multiplayer title. As you can see - once again the GeForce 8800 GTX outdoes the ATI card by a large margin with almost doubling the framerate.

3D Mark 2006

As you can see from the results above the GeForce card outdoes the ATI easily in 3DMark - and that's despite both cards being DirectX 10 based. The extra 2000 points is quite a jump that I wasn't fully expecting after using ATI cards for so long.  The performance increase wasn't just noticeable on the extra points, but just viewing the tests running showed how much better the nVidia card was compared to the opposition.

Crysis (High Detail 1680x1050) Average Frame Rate - DirectX 10

Crysis is one of those games that people are updating their hardware for just so they can show it off. My view here is that no one should ever update their PC just to play one title; especially one that while great to look at isn't actually a game most people will keep on playing. As you can see here the GeForce 8800 GTX outdoes the ATI card by almost doubling the framerate in DirectX 10 mode. The GTX card makes the game playable at high setting in DirectX 10 - although I have to say there is little difference between DirectX 9 and 10 - and the framerate increase when playing on the DirectX 9 version is far better for playing the game on. Remember that there are hacks on the internet that also allow you to run the DirectX 9 version with the same full detail that the DirectX 10 version is supposed to have, yet runs better, go figure.

Unreal Tournament 3 (1680x1050)

Unreal Tournament 3 on the PC is an excellent title - its great online and for once the single player side isn't all that bad for a short time! Graphically it is one of the best titles on show for the PC at the moment and the engine is as smooth as butter on both ATI and nVidia cards. The GeForce 8800 GTX one again outdoes the ATI card by over 20 frames per second though. The Unreal Engine is also one of the few that makes use of the Intel Quad core we are using for our review.

World in Conflict (Very High - DirectX 10 - 1680x1050)

World in Conflict is a very graphic intensive game and although the performance on the GeForce 8800 GTX is much better in DirectX 10 than the ATI card, the framerate isn't always perfect. 31 Frames Per Second for a strategy game is not too bad though and it is certainly very playable and not so noticeable when playing the campaign.

Final Comments:

To say I am impressed by the nVidia GeForce 8800 GTX would be an understatement. There are lots of things going for it not just gaming performance. Performance in Windows Vista has been excellent with no crashes for me since I setup a clean install of Windows Vista and Service Pack 1, the drivers are working very well with only the basic of problems (v-sync not working) and power consumption is far lower than that of the ATI card in my review.

Gaming performance has been excellent across the range of titles I have mentioned in my review as well as others that haven't made it in here such as Stalker and Neverwinter Nights 2. To be able to play games at high resolutions without having to worry that you will need to reduce quality settings is great news for gamers and right now the GeForce 8800 GTX is the card to get if you are into gaming on the PC.