NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX

Name: NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX - Page 14
Brand: NVIDIA

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, June 22, 2005, 08:30 AM EDT

Performance Comparisons with Half-Life 2

Details: http://www.half-life2.com/

Half Life 2

Thanks to the dedication of hardcore PC gamers and a huge mod-community, the original Half-Life became one of the most successful first person shooters of all time. So, when Valve announced Half-Life 2 was close to completion in mid-2003, gamers the world over sat in eager anticipation. Unfortunately, thanks to a compromised internal network, the theft of a portion of the game's source code, and a tumultuous relationship with the game's distributor, Vivendi Universal, we all had to wait until November 2004 to get our hands on this classic. We benchmarked Half-Life 2 with a long, custom-recorded timedemo in the "Canals" map, that takes us through both outdoor and indoor environments. These tests were run at resolutions of 1,280 x 1,024 and 1,600 x 1,200 without any anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering and with 4X anti-aliasing and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently.

What a difference a few months, and a couple of driver revisions can make. Our custom Half-Life 2 benchmark had historically been dominated by ATI hardware. And if you only focus on the performance of the GeForce 6 Series versus the Radeon X8x0s, that would still be the case. But with the introduction of the GeForce 7800 GTX, NVIDIA now has a clear performance advantage over ATI in Half-Life 2. The GeForce 7800 GTX put up numbers that were up to 82% faster than any other configuration in this test. A pair of GeForce 7800 GTX cards running in SLI mode further solidified NVIDIA's position, outpacing the best ATI currently has to offer by up to 60%. And again, the 7800 GTX SLI rig was CPU limited here, even at a resolution of 1,600 x 1,200 with 4XAA and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled.

Tags: Nvidia, GeForce, GTX, force, GT, 7800, 780, id

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com