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BFG GeForce 8800 GTS (640MB)

Michael Brown — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 13:21:45 -0600

Power users contemplating the purchase of BFG’s GeForce 8800 GTS face the same conundrum as those purchasing a card based on the 8800 GTX: No one knows how either product will perform with DirectX 10. As we observed with the GTX, however, the GTS is a flat-out screamer when it comes to DX9 software.

The GTS is outfitted with fewer stream-processor units (96 versus 128), less memory (640MB versus 768MB), and a narrower memory interface (320- versus 384-bit) than the GTX. But the price tag on this card brings it slightly out of the stratospheric heights of cards based on Nvidia’s more powerful 8800 GTX. That’s not to say it’s inexpensive—unless you consider $500 pocket change. Still, if you bought one of these today and a second one to run in SLI after prices drop, you could outrun a single 8800 GTX card.

The 8800 GTS delivers all the image-quality benefits that the GTX lards on—most of which are unobtainable with Nvidia’s 7-series: You can turn on AA and HDR lighting at the same time, you can enable noise reduction and edge enhancement while playing back video, and anisotropic filtering is much improved over Nvidia’s previous-generation parts.

Turning all these features on does entail a frame rate hit, but it’s not enough to impact gameplay. BFG’s GTS card ran FEAR, for instance, at a perfectly playable 32fps at a widescreen resolution of 1920x1200 with soft shadows turned on, 4x AA, and 16x aniso. Add a second card and you’ll get about the same frame rate at 2560x1600. Frame-rate junkies can turn off AA and dial back aniso to 8x to play the game at 55fps with a single card.

Yes, Nvidia has a winner on its hands. We can’t wait to see how ATI responds.

Month Reviewed: January 2007
Verdict: 9
kickass=yes
URL: www.bfgtech.com

HIS X1950 Pro IceQ3 Turbo

Michael Brown — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 12:51:28 -0600

Our enthusiasm for ATI’s new X1950 Pro GPU is tempered by the fact that the chip is incompatible with DirectX 10. And our enthusiasm for the clock-speed boost and advanced cooling that HIS graced this card with is tempered by the fact that it’s street-priced $60 higher than other third-party X1950 Pro cards.

If the fancy cooling and the overclocking it enables (HIS runs the core at 620MHz, compared with 575MHz stock; the 256MB of memory runs at 740MHz, compared with 690MHz stock) delivered significantly improved performance, we’d be all over it. But we achieved only mildly stronger benchmarks results with the IceQ3 than we did with ATI’s reference design.

As with HIS’ earlier X1900 XTX IceQ3, the copper heatsink covering the GPU is physically separated from the one attached to the memory. This prevents heat from transferring from one component to the other. And the bi-directional fan, set far back on the card, draws air from both sides and exhausts warm air out the chassis. The trade-off, however, is that this apparatus consumes two slots. ATI’s reference-design cards are svelte single-slotters, and we found them to be only slightly louder.

We were going to try ATI’s Overdrive feature to see if we could take the card even further, but we discovered that Overdrive does not appear in the Catalyst toolbar when the HIS card is installed. Catalyst Control Center automatically shuts off access to Overdrive if the card manufacturer departs from ATI’s reference design. In this case, HIS apparently uses a thermal ASIC that the driver doesn’t recognize.

HIS sent us only one card, so we paired it with a ref-design X1950 Pro to test CrossFire. The internal CrossFire connections are a huge improvement over the previous dongle design, but performance was the same as or slightly slower than what we saw running two stock X1950 Pro cards. Bottom line: We’re not impressed.

Month Reviewed: January 2007
Verdict: 6
URL: www.hisdigital.com

Asus EN8800 GTX

Michael Brown — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 15:45:01 -0600

Being an early adopter means taking chances. And since the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX GPU at the heart of Asus’ EN8800 GTX hits the market well in advance of DirectX 10, Vista, and DirectX 10 games, early adopters buying this pricey slab of technology will give the wheel of fortune a mighty spin because no one has a clue how it will perform with DirectX 10 software.

We covered the 8800 GTX’s speeds and feeds in some detail in the DirectX 10 feature story also in this issue (page 26), so we won’t spend a lot of time covering the same ground here. But after thoroughly benchmarking this beast with DirectX 9 titles, we can tell you this: The EN8800 GTX is one powerful videocard.

We’re not talking marginally faster than the best cards preceding it. We’re talking 50- to 100-percent faster than the fastest GeForce 7900 GTX card we’ve ever tested. We’re talking as much as 25-percent faster than two of those cards running in SLI. We’re talking fast enough to get impressive frame rates playing FEAR at 2560x1600 on a 30-inch panel—with 4x antialiasing, 16x aniso, and soft shadows enabled.

This card is not only faster, it’s also more capable than Nvidia’s previous best. The high end of Nvidia’s 7-series cards were quick for their day, typically hitting high-water marks ahead of ATI’s best, but they weren’t capable of rendering AA and high dynamic-range lighting at the same time. The 8800 GTX has no such limitation. Nvidia is so proud of this development that it coined a goofy marketing name to describe it: the Lumenex Engine.

Nvidia claims its new processors can deliver 16x full-screen multisampled AA for nearly the same performance hit as older boards took to perform 4x multisampled AA. This advance is the result of a newly developed algorithm called Coverage Sampling Anti-Aliasing (CSAA). The new GPU also supports transparency antialiasing to eliminate jagged edges on alpha (transparent) textures commonly used in the rendering of foliage, chain-link fence, and similar objects. When we put Nvidia’s claims to the test, we found that enabling the feature in the driver while dialing the application’s AA setting to 4x resulted in much-improved image quality with no more than a 5-percent performance hit. Impressive. Nvidia delivers dramatically better anisotropic texture filtering than previous generations, too.

The 8800 GTX (and the 8800 GTS reviewed on page 70) supports high dynamic-range (HDR) lighting with 128-bits of precision (32 bits for each color component: red, green, blue, and alpha). Another significant improvement to the GeForce 8800 is its 10-bit display pipeline, which allows the GPU to display more than a billion colors, compared to the 16.7-million color palette that an 8-bit pipeline can deliver. Nvidia is catching up to ATI on this last score, although the price of 10-bit displays keeps them out of reach for most consumers.

The new GPU scores significantly higher on the punishing HQV video playback test, too. Nvidia finally decided to give its PureVideo software away with the card, unlike with early versions of the product. Enable hardware acceleration in your video-player software and turn on noise reduction in the Nvidia control panel, and you’ll be treated to great video playback. But ATI hasn’t been idle on the video front, either. After a series of driver tweaks in its latest versions of the Avivo software, we now score ATI’s high-end cards just a wee bit higher than the 8800.

Circling back to the opening of this review, perhaps Dirty Harry said it best: “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya?” This is the best DX9 part we’ve ever seen; will we be able to say the same about its DX10 capabilities? Right now, we’re feeling pretty lucky.

Month Reviewed: January 2007
+ DIRTY HARRY: Compatible with DX10; bitchin’-fast with DX9 software; loads of memory; quiet.
- HARRY & THE HENDERSONS: DX10 performance is unknown (and for now, unknowable); pricey.
Verdict: 9
kickass=yes
URL: www.asus.com