The Right Graphics Card for Your Need

Continued from page: 5

Monday, October 01, 2007

Extreme gaming

This segment belongs to the game maniacs, for whom money is secondary and performance is a priority. NVIDIA rules the roost in this segment with no ATI cards to give them any competition. In fact, the Extreme Gaming category gave us a very tough time choosing the best among the lot. There is hardly any performance difference between these cards and feature wise also they are similar. Only major difference is on the price point, which is not a very big concern for this segment of buyers. Hence if you see the final score you will clearly notice that there is hardly anything to choose between these cards.

3D Mark06 and Vista score
We expected to see some noticeable difference in 3D Mark06, but there was hardly any. The two cards that topped the score were XFX Ultra and Galaxy Ultra with scores of 11814 and 11812 respectively. Asus 8800GTX Aquatank wasn't far behind with a score of 11738 followed by XFX 8800 GTX and Asus 8800GTX. XFX Ultra had the highest core clock speed among the lot followed by Asus 8800GTX Aqua Tank, which eventually attributed toward their high score in all the tests. In Vista all scored a whopping 5.9 in Vista Gaming score and gave a score of 5 for over all Vista experience, which is excellent.

Asus EN 8800GTX Aquatank

F.E.A.R
We trusted F.E.A.R to bring some relief for us in indentifying the best card from the lot, but it also couldn't help us, as the performance difference even at high resolution with both AA (Anti-Aliasing) and AF (Anisotropic Filtering) at maximum was not significant. Clearly a difference of only 14 fps between the top scorer and the lowest scorer doesn't indicate supremacy of any card over the other. This was the trend that was noticed in all the game tests we ran. The highest scorer in F.E.A.R was achieved again by XFX Ultra (average of 130 fps) followed by Galaxy Ultra (average of 128 fps).

Company of Heroes
One of the most graphically challenging games of the current generation, Company of Heroes was bound to stress these monstrous cards to its optimum limit. Again very little to judge from the scores at different resolutions, but one surprise was that Asus 8800GTX Aquatank top scored with an average of 159.9 fps at 1024x768 resolution but when we increased the resolution to 1360x768 (widescreen) it couldn't maintain its top position and XFX Ultra regained the top spot.

Doom 3
We were a little disappointed with the score of Doom 3 in this range. We expected all the cards to score very heavily but all gave an average of 60 fps, which is a low score for this range of card. We believe the bottleneck was not with the card, but with the settings as the frame rate was locked at 60 fps so we could not get anything beyond 60 fps score. As Doom 3 continues to be one of the most important benchmark to stress any card, we carried on with the score we got from it.

XFX 8800 Ultra

BioShock
Undoubtedly among the most stressful and graphically demanding game of the current generation, BioShock can stress any card to its premium limit. With high-quality physics and geometry level, this DirectX 10 game didn't have any in-game benchmark, so we used FRAP to calculate the fps at various resolutions. The only issue was with the frame locked at 60 fps, nothing beyond that can be achieved without tweaking or using cracks to unlock the frame. One interesting observation in BioShock was that as we increased the resolution from 1024x768 to 1280x1024 we did notice fps dropping but much to our surprise at 1360x768 (widescreen) the fps again increased instead of dropping further. All the cards performed at par with each other and the result difference was not significant to draw any conclusion.

The verdict
All the cards were evenly matched and there was little to separate them in terms of performance or features. Since all of them were based on the same 8800 GTX chipset with the same amount of RAM, so the performance results were very close to each other. We generally decide on the winner based on price, performance, and features. In features we included HDCP, cooling, and game bundle as the major deciding factor. HDCP had its presence in all the cards and hence was not a critical parameter. All the cards came with 3 years warranty and hence warranty didn't play an important role in determining the winner.

Editor's choice
Asus 8800GTX Aquatank is the complete winning package, be it performance or features. Though it is the most expensive card of the lot, with its strong performance, attributed by higher core clock speed and an excellent cooling solution, it deserves the top spot. Asus bundle their card with 2 games compared to one by XFX and none by Galaxy. It helped Asus score more on features. Performance was just marginally behind XFX Ultra and performed at par with Galaxy Ultra. With an overall score of 97 (out of 100) this great performer comes with an excellent cooling solution and is worth dishing out a few extra bucks for.

Labs recommended
XFX 8800 Ultra is the performance king in this category. It topped all game and benchmark scores and a performance score of 100 (out of 100) clearly indicates its supremacy over others. Even though Galaxy 8800 Ultra is also a tempting option mainly because of its affordable price point and value for money, XFX Ultra will any day be a better performer, thanks to its higher core clock speed.

If top performance is your only requirement, XFX Ultra will suffice your needs.

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