NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX and 8800 GTS: Unified Powerhouses

by Marco Chiappetta and Dave Altavilla — Wednesday, November 08, 2006, 01:00 PM EDT

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XHD Resolutions: Quake 4

Performance Comparisons with Quake 4 XHD

Details: http://www.quake4game.com/

Quake 4

id Software, in conjunction with developer Raven, recently released the latest addition to the classic Quake franchise, Quake 4. Quake 4 is based upon an updated and slightly modified version of the Doom 3 engine, and as such performance characteristics between the two titles are very similar. Like Doom 3, Quake 4 is also an OpenGL game that uses extremely high-detailed textures and a ton of dynamic lighting and shadows, but unlike Doom3, Quake 4 features some outdoor environments as well. We ran this these Quake 4 benchmarks using a custom demo with the game set to its "High-Quality" mode, at resolutions of 1920 x 1200 and 2560 x 1600 with 4X AA and 8X aniso enabled simultaneously.

With a Core 2 Extreme X6800 powering the system and the multi-threaded v1.3 patch installed, all of the cards we tested, with the exception of the GeForce 7900 GTX perhaps, put up playable framerates at both of the XHD resolutions we tested. The GeForce 8800 GTS finished just behind the GeForce 7950 GX2 at both resolutions, and missed the mark set by the Radeon X1950 XTX by about 10% at 2560 x 1600, but its performance was clearly superior to the 7900 GTX. The new GeForce 8800 GTX on the other hand performed extraordinarily in comparison to all of the other cards. Its large frame buffer and higher clocks (relative to the 8800 GTS) propelled the 8800 GTX to the top of the charts by large margins.