NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX and 8800 GTS: Unified Powerhouses
In an effort to mix things up a bit and get as far away from the first person shooter genre as possible, we have EA's Need For Speed: Carbon on tap next. A jacked up, pimped out racing simulation with plenty of eye candy, NFS: Carbon should push these cards a bit more to the point where even a new GeForce 8800 series GPU breaks a sweat.
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;) Need For Speed: Carbon |
Dating back to the days of floppy disks, EGA, and the Lamborghini Countach, the Need For Speed franchise is undoubtedly one of the most popular in gaming history. The most recent addition to the franchise is Need For Speed: Carbon, a racing-sim loaded with muscle cars and exotics in addition to a number of lighting and special graphics effects. We ran these NFS: Carbon benchmarks by utilizing FRAPS and tracking framerates on the same track, using the same car with every graphics card. The game was configured with all of its graphics-related options set to their maximum values, with motion blur enabled. We tested the game at resolutions of 1,280 x 1,024 and 1,600 x 1,200 with 4X AA and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled simultaneously. |
Talk about a whole new world, whether you consider our Prey, F.E.A.R., or Half Life 2: Episode 1 tests, nothing put the hurt on these new Graphics cards like NFS Carbon. Of course you don't need blistering fast frame rates to play this great new racing sim either. Our first observation is that NVIDIA has some driver work to do to get SLI working with the game, as the GeForce 7950 GX2 was having major issues with its dual-GPU setup if it couldn't even beat out a GeForce 7900 GTX. Beyond that, the new Radeon X1950 XTX puts out a solid performance but can't quite catch the drift of a GeForce 8800 GTS. And of course, at the risque of sounding mildly trite, the GeForce 8800 GTX leaves all other competitors in its dust. This new flagship monster GPU from NVIDIA is over 40% faster than the fastest ATI currently has to offer, in our Need For Speed: Carbon testing.
