NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX and 8800 GTS: Unified Powerhouses

For the next round of testing, we've upped the ante and re-tested all of the graphics cards at XHD resolutions with a handful of games.

Performance Comparisons with Half-Life 2: Episode 1 XHD Details: http://www.half-life2.com/

Half Life 2: Episode 1

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, gamers the world over sat in eager anticipation. Upon its release, HL2 was universally lauded, and the sequel won an array of "Game of the Year" awards. Armed with the latest episodic update to HL2, Episode 1, we benchmarked the game with a long, custom-recorded timedemo that takes us through both outdoor and indoor environments. These tests were run at resolutions of 1920 x 1200 and 2560 x 1600 with 4X anti-aliasing and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently, and with color correction and HDR rendering enabled in the game engine as well.

Once again, NVIDIA's new GeForce 8800 series cards are able to outpace all of the competition in almost every test configuration. The GeForce 8800 GTS was every so slightly slower than the GeForce 7950 GX2 at the higher resolution, likely do to the GX2's larger frame buffer (1GB vs. 640MB), but in the other three tests the GTS and 8800 GTX were dominant. In fact, the GeForce 8800 GTX was about twice as fast as the older, former single-GPU powered kingpins, the GeForce 7900 GTX and Radeon X1950 XTX.