Asus Extreme N7800 GT Dual Sneak Peek Preview

Name: Asus Extreme N7800 GT Dual Sneak Peek Preview - Page 4
Brand: Asus

by Dave Altavilla and Marco Chiappetta — Friday, October 14, 2005, 11:00 AM EDT

Doom 3 - TBC

Page 4: Doom 3 - TBC

Performance Comparisons with Doom 3

Details: http://www.doom3.com/

Doom 3

id Software's games have long been pushing the limits of 3D graphics. Quake, Quake 2, and Quake 3 were all instrumental in the success of 3D accelerators on the PC. Now, many years later, with virtually every new desktop computer shipping with some sort of 3D accelerator, id is at it again with the visually stunning Doom 3. Like most of id's previous titles, Doom 3 is an OpenGL game that uses extremely high-detailed textures and a ton of dynamic lighting and shadows. We ran this batch of Doom 3 single player benchmarks using a custom demo with the game set to its "High-Quality" mode, at resolutions of 1,280 x 1,024 and 1,600 x 1,200 without anti-aliasing enabled and then again with 4X AA and 8X aniso enabled simultaneously.

Every time we run a new batch of Doom 3 benchmarks, we can't help but be impressed by what NVIDIA's hardware can do in this game. Our custom single-player Doom 3 benchmark proved to be no match for the Asus Extreme N7800 GT Dual scored over 100 FPS at 1600x1200 with 4xAA and 8xAF enabled, and almost broke the 200 FPS barrier at 1280x1024 when the additional pixel processing was disabled. Only the GeForce 7800 GTX SLI configuration was able to outperform the Asus Extreme N7800 GT Dual, but the traditional 7800 GTX SLI rig's margins of victory were quite small at every test configuration.

We hope you enjoyed our quick-take preview of performance with this exciting new Graphics product from Asus. Based on our initial experiences with this card, we're fairly impressed but would like to look further into what makes this card tick. Specifically we have questions as to how a pair of GeForce 7800 GTs in a single board configuration can compete with a pair of GeForce 7800 GTX cards in traditional SLI mode. That's 48 pixel pipelines grinding it out against 40. And since our scores above are based on the standard 430MHz/1.2GHz clock speeds of GeForce 7800 GTX, which are identical to this new Asus dual GPU card, since it is slightly goosed up over reference GeForce 7800 GT specs, are we looking simply at the lower latencies that are inherent to inter-GPU transactions on a single PCB? We'll peel back the onion a bit more to see what's down deep, in our full article showcase. So stick around!