GFX cards

[Dewey]

Originally posted by FBG@Sep 22 2005, 05:42 PM
Oooh, what are the 7800GTX like? Any good reviews?

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At these higher clock speeds, a single (!) XFX GeForce 7800 GTX Overclocked card outperforms two GeForce 6800 GT cards in an SLI configuration across the board, and in most benchmarks, even beats two GeForce 6800 Ultra cards in SLI as well. This is some serious graphics horsepower for a single graphics card. In order to get the best performance out of these cards, you really do need a fairly high-end processor and you do need to run your games at high resolutions with the image quality effects turned up. The XFX cards really shine on newer titles like Battlefield 2 and FEAR, besting dual 6800 Ultra cards in SLI at a far lower price tag. 

The speed-demon GeForce 7800 GTX reference board we tested was a single-slot PCI Express x16 card equipped with a 430-MHz processor, 256MB of 600-MHz DDR3 memory, and dual DVI outputs. It set new speed records in almost all of the PC World Test Center's gaming tests--an impressive feat in and of itself. In our Doom 3 test with antialiasing, the 7800 GTX posted frame rates of 65 and 42 frames per second, at resolutions of 1024 by 768 and 1600 by 1200, respectively. By contrast, a previous speed leader, ATI's $500 Radeon 850 XT Platinum Edition, managed 52 and 31 fps, respectively, in the same tests.

The results of our Far Cry test were almost as dramatic. The 7800 GTX turned out 50 fps at 1600 by 1200 resolution with antialiasing on. The next-fastest board, a GeForce 6800 GT, cranked out 34 fps; ATI's 850 Platinum managed only 17 fps. Midrange graphics boards like NVidia's GeForce 6600 GT, which costs around $200, completed the same Far Cry test at about 19 fps.