Gamer or Lamer? Choose your Weapon

Indian gamers have never had it so good. With everybody

believing in 'The Indian Story', prices are dropping faster than bombs in



Iraq



and the choices are like never before. What's more, even entry-level cards

today give some pretty amazing performance. The top end of course, costs an arm

and a leg but the performance is so phenomenal that the cards that were top end

a few months back are already appearing sluggish and mediocre.

How we tested



We tested the cards on a variety of parameters which included performance,

bundle and price. For performance, we took a two-tier approach. The entry and

mid-range cards were tested at 1024x768 and 1200x1024 as the resolutions and

2xAA and 4xAF being the quality settings. For high and top-end cards, we added

another 1600x1200 as the highest resolution and the quality settings were fixed

at 4xAA and 8xAF. For all cards, we took the scores with AA/AF enabled as well

as disabled.

The games we used for the benchmark were Far Cry (Patch

1.33), Quake 4, Doom 3 and F.E.A.R. Along with these, we also used 3DMark 2005

at its default settings as it gives a reasonable estimate of the overall

graphics performance of the cards

The categories



With the extremely varied price points, we definitely had a hard time

classifying the cards. We classified the cards as follows:

The test bed While normally we set up identical



testbeds for the shootout, we set up slightly different ones here. For testing

NVIDIA cards the testbed consisted of AMD Athlon X2 4800+, 2x512MB DDR400 RAM

(dual channel enabled), ASUS A8N32SLI motherboard and a 120GB Seagate SATA HDD.

For testing the ATi cards, all else was kept the same as

above, except that we changed the board from ASUS A8N32 SLI to ASUS A8R32MVP.

The reason for the difference was that ATi had communicated

to us that their cards under perform when coupled with NVIDIA-based boards. They

said this was because NVIDIA refuses to open up and collaborate for a common

platform.

While we definitely checked out and found the performance

issue to be true (the performance difference is between 5—10%), we cannot

confirm either ways whether it is NVIDIA that is locking up its boards against

ATi or if it is ATi that is locking up its cards against NVIDIA-based boards.

Either ways, to be fair to both, we tested out the cards on different boards.

We would request you to kindly check for compatibility

issues before buying your graphics and motherboard solution.

With the civilities out of the way, lets



get down to finding out who is the performance king!

Entry level cards



These cards should be considered for the simple reason that you have bought

a motherboard without on-board graphics and need a display adapter but don't

have enough money to buy a decent card. These cards are simply not cut out for

any level of gaming experience and really should be bought if the rest of the PC

buying has not left any money in your pockets!

While manufacturers will try to sell these cards with

various gimmicks around them and a never ending feature list, the blunt fact is

that these are entry level cards and they perform like them. For even a remotely

enjoyable gaming experience, move on to our budget or mid-range cards section.

There is an interesting concept that NVIDIA is really

selling to its customers. Its called TC (TurboCache). What it means is that the

card will share some memory from the system and thus, the effective memory

available doubles. This means that if you buy a 6200TC with 128MB of RAM, it can

scale upto 256 MB by eating into your



system RAM. A word of caution which we would like to put in is that, just

because it



reserves some of the RAM for its use, it doesn't mean it will start performing

like a card with native 256MB of video RAM. This is because retrieving stored

data in the TC is still significantly slower than retrieving it from embedded

memory.

Having said that, in our tests, we actually found some of

the 128MB TC cards matching up to those with native 128MB memory. This is indeed

impressive because it implies that NVIDIA has got a terrific prediction system

which can guess quite efficiently as to what data should be in the embedded

memory and what should be stored in the TC. No doubt, the concept of TC has been

seriously boosted now that motherboard interconnect is via PCI-express instead

of the PCI used earlier.

Nvidia 6600

Far Cry Far Cry is one of the most beautiful

games out there. The graphics and the physics are some of the best around. It is

then a testament to the level of advancement that even the lowest end cards



were able to play this game without much



problems.

We were actually very surprised that a card costing a mere

Rs 2700 was giving a very playable 35 FPS at 1280x1024. If you are willing to

turn down your resolution a bit, you can crank up the quality settings all the

way to 4xAA/8xAF, which will make the water ripples look simply surreal!

But of course, for more graphics-intensive games like Quake 4 and F.E.A.R, these

cards are simply not good enough. While you will be able to just about eke out

playable frame rates with every setting turned to low or off, the gaming

experience is miserable.

Doom 3 and Quake 4 Although Quake 4 does look

significantly better than Doom 3, they both essentially use the same engine,

which is why we have clubbed them together. By and large, due to the heavier

graphics load, cards give lesser FPS in Quake 4 than in Doom3.

Again, these cards will allow you to play Doom3 and Quake 4

at only the lowest quality settings. Increasing the quality levels even slightly

makes the game pretty choppy and unplayable. Even if you were to spend all of 6k

on a card, you will still not be able to play the game as the developers wanted

you to.

F.E.A.R This is one of the most graphics intensive

games available today. Even at the highest levels, cards have trouble rendering

it so obviously, at this end of the chain, the cards are simply not built to

handle the sheer calculations it belts out. There is no way you are going to be

able to get any kind of reasonable game play experience with the entry level

cards. The game will simply not run on them, so if you want to play F.E.A.R (and

indeed the games to come), look elsewhere.

All our cards here (Turbo Cache or not) performed quite

miserably. This was most definitely due to the restricited pixel pipelines

available to them. At four per card, they simply lack the sheer power of

processing.

The winners While the entry-level cards don't come

with any kind of a bundle, it is wrong to expect any, simply because of the

ultra low price point. Our “Highly Recommended award” is won by Gainward

Powerpack GeForce6200 card for its decent performance coupled with ultra low

pricing.

The “Editor's Choice award” goes to Leadtek PX6600LE

for its impressive performance even under the stress of F.E.A.R. Even though its

priced under 6k, it performs slightly better than cards priced a little higher

like the ASUS EAX1300Pro.

Budget gaming



This is where the fun begins. With cards being priced between 6—12k, we

were



hoping to see some real fireworks and the manufacturers haven't disappointed

us.

Silent ASUS Before we begin with the score analysis,

we would like to specifically talk about ASUS's 'Silent' tag for a bit.

The biggest problem some gamers face is that some  cards have quite noisy

heatsinks. With the fan whirring away at its maximum, the sound is loud enough

to irritate and spoil



the fun.

ASUS has shown some pretty remarkable engineering and has

managed to do away with the heatsink fan altogether! Instead, it has a

brilliantly innovative fanless design (replicated even on some of the

motherboards, including the A8N32-SLI) which helps keep the card cool. While it

would be fair to say this design definitely works in most situations and really

does make a huge difference in terms of system noise, there is one issue with

it.  The issue being overclocking ability.

You see, a fan really is much more efficient in keeping

temperatures lower. While at stock speeds (which maybe higher than NVIDIA's

reference speeds, mind you) the card's fanless design can take the heat, if

you were to overclock it, the card became too hot too fast. This reduces your

ability to basically overclock the card beyond a certain point. A case in point

being the X1300Pro Silent. We tried over-clocking it but couldn't manage it

beyond 610MHz, The card then started seriously overheating and our system

started freezing or shutting down. The X1300Pro regular edition could be

overclocked to a cool 625 MHz without any issue!

Clearly, the difference between the cards lie in the heat

sinks. The fan clearly makes a difference even though it is certainly a lot



noisier.

Personally, while we are pretty impressed with ASUS's

Silent Cooling technology, we aren't willing to sacrifice overclocking

capabilities. Give us a noisy fan any day and if it interferes with the gaming

experience, simply turn up the volume a few notches!

Far Cry If you buy in this segment, you can expect

some pretty reasonable performance. A game like Far Cry can be comfortably

played at 1280x1024 with 4xAA and 8xAF. The point to note here is that even

though a 30+ frame rate is considered more than reasonable, our eyes cannot make

out the difference above 30fps. If you are coupling this card with a slower

processor (ours was a mega X2 4800+), you might see some framing when there are

too many enemies around, as your system struggles to cope up with the game A.I.

The 6800GT clearly outdoes everyone here. Even the newer

X1600XT gets completely decimated by it. The interesting thing to note here is

that the 6800GT is clocked significantly lower than other cards, but it outdoes

them because of the sheer number of pixel processors!

Doom 3 and Quake 4 Again, here we see that the

6800GT far outshines its rivals, thanks to its massive pixel processors. The

other cards don't do too badly though. The X1600XT does come in a comfortable

second here. This is also the category where we are beginning some pretty decent

packaging, especially at the top end of the field with games like Far Cry being

part of the bundle! We were quite impressed with XFX, as they seem to have the

best prices with the best bundles!

F.E.A.R Finally, we come to a level where the cards

can handle FEAR to a reasonable extent. Of course, even then you will only be

able to play FEAR at 1280x960 (remember that FEAR doesn't have 1280x1024) with

AA/AF switched off, you will at least be able to play it!

The winners It is clear that core clock speeds

don't count for much if they aren't backed up by some impressive processing

power. If you match the core clocks of the X1600XT and 6800GT, you will find

that 1600XT is clocked almost twice as fast (as is the X1300Pro!), but the

6800GT outshines it simply because it has 16 pixel pipelines instead of 12 on

the 1600XT! An increase of just 4 pipelines has helped the card overshadow a

significantly higher clocked card! This is a phenomenon we will see more of as

we progress higher up the order and will become extremely pronounced when we

talk about cards like 7900GTX and 1900XTX.

In this category, the “Editor's Choice Award” goes to

the XFX 6800GT, while the “Highly Recommended award” goes to Powercolor

X1600XT.

A word of advice. NVIDIA has discontinued the 6800GT core.

The only 6800 series card still in production is the 6800GS which is available

for a mere Rs 500 more and ends up performing better. So



if you have around 12k to spend



on a card, we would actually recommend you to buy XFX 6800GS.

Mid-range gaming



This category is for the serious gamers. If you want superb quality and

don't mind paying big bucks for it, this ones for you!

Interestingly, this category consists mostly of NVIDIA's

6800GS based cards and a single 7600GT from MSI and the AX800 Silenzer from

ASUS.

Far Cry This game becomes an easy play for these

cards and they just whizzed through it without any problems whatsoever. We were

particularly stunned by the MSI NX7600GT, which gave a cool 51fps even at

1600x1200 4xAA/8xAF. It easily outshined the others with only the gainward

6800GS, making it anywhere close at 50. It seems the higher clock speed coupled

with 12 pixel shaders really did the job for this card. It even outshined the

6800GS from Zebronics, even though, it came with 512MB of video memory! Again,

the core clock is perhaps more important than the amount of memory on board.

Doom 3 & Quake 4 The story was no different

here. The 7600GT was simply in a league of its own. The heavy textures and

graphics of Doom3 and Quake 4 didn't really do much to impediment the card's

performance and it gave a pretty comfortable frame rate of 69 even at 1600x1200

4AA/8xAF!

We were quite disappointed by the XFX 6800GS XXX edition

though. We really



expected a lot more from it but clearly, the newer 7x cores from NVIDIA are

overall superior to the series 6x and it is definitely showing here!

F.E.A.R This is the real acid test for any card.

Here also, NX7600GT was the only card which could give us a 30+ frame rate,

which is truly commendable for a card costing just 14k.  The others

didn't do so well and none of the others would ever let you play F.E.A.R at

1600x1200 4xAA/8xAF unless you get down to some serious overclocking.

The winners MSI's NX7600GT easily bags the

“Editor's Choice award” because of the sheer performance and the

unbelievable price.

The “Highly Recommended award” goes to XFX 6800GS XXX

edition for the excellent value proposition it carries.

What surprised us was that MSI was still selling its 6800GS

for Rs 19,000. That's pretty absurd as far as pricing goes since the 7600GT

far outshines it and costs about Rs 5000 rupees lesser!

While we are definitely impressed, what we would love to

see in future is manufacturers taking this great card and overclocking it and

souping it up with bigger and better heat-sinks. That is when the performance

will really begin to show and we suspect it might overshadow some of the cards

in the extreme category even!

High-End gaming



This is where we get to the cards that are for those with serious gaming

intentions and big bucks to back them. The section basically was made up of

7800s and X1800s which is quite surprising because a few months back, these

cards were in our extreme category and already they are on their way out!

Interestingly, Powercolor X1800XT was the only 512MB card in this category and

the added memory definitely helped it in beating everybody else pretty

convincingly.

Far Cry This game is pretty graphics intensive but

the cards in this category made small work of it and whizzed through it in no

time flat. All cards did more or less comparable frame rates and the difference

of 1-2 percent is really negligible. It was when we cranked the settings all the

way to 1600x1200 did we see the X1800Xt emerge as a clear winner. No doubt, the

bumped up high speed memory helped it through the large amounts of uncompressed

textures and such. The other card that really impressed here was the ASUS

EN7800GTX with 256 MB of RAM. The card did well to keep close to the vastly

superior X1800XT which eked out a small lead, solely because of its video

memory.

Doom 3 and Quake 4 With the results in Far Cry, we

expected the X1800XT to shine through here as well because the 512MB of GDDR3

will definitely help feed its fast clocked core and thus give out some pretty

amazing results. It did just that.

The card left everyone else behind even at the basic

setting of 1024x768 no AA/AF. It only got better as quality settings increased

and we saw the NVIDIA based cards give up significant chunks of their FPSes to

compensate for the 4xAA/8xAF. This is something we continued to see through out.

ATi cards seem to suffer lesser penalty for higher quality settings compared to

NVIDIA cards.

The ASUS 7800GTX did well here as well and while it

couldn't match the X1800XT score for score, it came pretty close.

F.E.A.R Our favorite test would again tell us which

card really does have the power and it proved us right once again, the X1800XT

doesn't seem to have a match anywhere in this category. It simply blazes

through F.E.A.R and that's really saying a lot. Had ATi kept the price up and

it had landed in our extreme gaming category, it would've definitely lost out

to the 7800GTX 512MB as that is really a far superior card but the price point

of this card makes it a killer deal.

The ASUS EN7800GTX couldn't keep up with F.E.A.R and gave

us a surprisingly low score of 31FPS at 1600x1200 4xAA/8xAF while the X1800XT

gave us a solid 49.

The Winners Selcting the winners here was

easy. The Powercolor X1800XT with its 512MB of video memory outshined all others

quite comfortably and thus bags the Editor's Choice.

The XFX 7800GT 256MB does a pretty commendable job and

costs just Rs 21,000, 2000 more than the exorbitantly priced MSI 6800GS! We

therefor award the XFX7800GT “Highly Recommended”for high-end gaming.

Extreme Gaming



This is the segment for those for whom money is no object (or company pays

for everything!) and they want just the absolute fastest.

This segment has seen some pretty hot action in the past

few months with both ATi and NVIDIA trying to grab the numero uno spot.

While we made it clear some issues back that NVIDIA was

clearly second to ATi's X1900XTX, NVIDIA has since then launched the 7900GTX

and its performance is impressive. However, it is not really anywhere near the

performance we have come to see from the X1900XTX and that still retains the

crown of the fastest card on the planet.

Having said that, we commend NVIDIA for bringing down the

price of its top end product to around 34k. Although, to be fair, since it

couldn't wrest the 'fastest' title away from ATi, it might not have been

left with a choice.

Far Cry



The CPU lock story continues here and all cards pretty much went through

this test at full throttle making it more or less redundant. Perhaps we will see

a difference in scores if we put in the brand new Athlon FX 60, but we'll

update you on that once we are through testing it in our labs.

Nevertheless, the ASUS X1900XTX did outshine everybody else

and was definitely the card to beat! It was followed home by MSI 7900GTX. But to

be fair, only the subsequent tests will really tell us the whole story about

just how much muscle power each card carries.

Doom 3 & Quake 4 The minute we crank up the

graphics settings all the way up, we can immediately see the clear superiority

of X1900XTX. The 48 pixel shaders make small work of all the ultra detailed

graphics in these games. For some reason, even the water and smoke effects start

seeming to be a lot more natural.

Another superb card here though is the ASUS EN7900GTX

512MB. While the performance of this card is not top of the line, it is not far

off either and the price makes it a steal, at just 33,900!

Definitely, our pick of the cards for this test are ASUS

EAX1900XTX and the ASUS EN7900GTX.

F.E.A.R This is truly the test which separates men

from boys. Running the test at every



detail at maximum quality and resolution really loads up the processors in a

card and even the tiniest chinks in the design show. The X1900XTX left all the

others to dust. They were the only cards which could give a 60+fps even at

1600x1200 4xAA/8xAF!  So, they definitely look good for the



performance awards!

The winners



It's a no brainer in reality. If all that you want is absolute

performance, you can't go wrong with the ASUS EAX1900XTX.

It's just unbelievably fast and the best part is that you

can overclock it further! It therefore gets the Editor's Choice for this

category and the “Best Performance” overall as well.

If you want to have one of the best cards around but

can't shell out too much money for it, then you could look at the ASUS

EN7900GTX 512MB at Rs 33,900. It's performance is not really that far off the

mark from the 1900XTX and it is a cool Rs 7000 cheaper! Plus, it has a great

bundle as well.

Final thoughts



We love it when ATi and NVIDIA try to outdo each other for it always results

in



better and more cheaply priced products for the end user. If you look at some of

the top end cards today, they reflect more  a difference in philosophy than

the technological capability.

Comparing the specifications, you will find that ATi has

crammed the X1900XTX with a whopping 48 pixel shaders! This is not without

reason. The pixel shader calculations in the games today have grown manyfolds

since the days of pacman and the idea seems to be right, as at highest quality

settings, ATi's X1900XTX leaves all NVIDIA cards to dust.

Throughout this shootout, at high quality levels, NVIDIA

cards had a higher frame rate drop in frames than ATi.

NVIDIA feels people don't really care much about whether

their card gives thema score of 110fps or 130fps but are more concerned about

the cost. That's why the 7900GTX is essentially an updated 7800GTX chip (die

shrink and associated complexities not withstanding).

We are truly impressed by ATi's X1900XTX. From playing

catch-up ever since NVIDIA's GeForce Series 6 cards, ATi has come back with a

bang. We cant wait for NVIDIA's G80 and ATi's R600 to hit the market. They

will surely relegate our current winners to mediocre level cards at best! Amen.

Varun Dubey

Click here to see

performance and feature table of the gaming cards.