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Half Life 2 4xAA/16xAF 1600x1200

Radeon X1950 XTX GeForce 8800GTX

FPS 60.74 116.93


Quake 4 4xAA 1600x1200

Radeon X1950 XTX GeForce 8800GTX

FPS 34.23 65.93

Prey 4xAA/16xAF 1600x1200

Radeon X1950 XTX GeForce 8800GTX

FPS 55.53 88.87

Half Life 2: Lost Coast loves the GeForce 8800GTX. Here the GeForce 8800GTX is able to show significant performance gains over AMD’s ATI Radeon X1950 XTX—approximately 92%.

Quake 4 shows similar gains as Half Life 2: Lost Coast too, an approximate 92% improvement.

Prey is based on the same game engine as Quake 4. However, Prey shows smaller performance differences between the GeForce 8800GTX and ATI Radeon X1950 XTX, albeit its still 60%.

Power Consumption
Watts
Radeon X1950 XTX GeForce 8800GTX

Idle 184 229

Load 308 321

DailyTech previously reported NVIDIA recommends a 450-watt power supply for a single GeForce 8800GTX graphics card. This isn’t too farfetched of a recommendation. Power consumption of NVIDIA’s GeForce 8800GTX isn’t as bad as expected. When compared to AMD’s current flagship ATI Radeon X1950 XTX, the GeForce 8800GTX only consumes 24% more power at idle. The power consumption differences under load decreases to around 4%. Considering the performance differences, the GeForce 8800GTX is no worse than AMD’s ATI Radeon X1950 XTX in terms of performance-per-watt.

Expect NVIDIA’s GeForce 8800GTX and 8800GTS graphics cards to be available next week. As NVIDIA has had plenty of time to ramp up production and ship out cards, this will be a hard launch with immediate availability.

Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:Looks like it really will be a new standard in graphics. And I do have to gloat for a second about the fact that I was right about the power issue and all the people buying 600 and 700 Watt units were wrong.

InnocentBystander wrote:Any word on the price of these things?

Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:That's just early adopter price gouging. Retail prices at launch are rumored to be $650 for the GTX and $450-$500 for the GTS. If it follows the path of the 7800 series, it might even be available for $50-75 under MSRP within a few weeks of launch, but that was an anomaly and I wouldn't expect a repeat. Availibility is a huge question mark. I don't think anyone knows for sure whether it will be a hard launch or paper launch. The last two series of cards NVidia has introduced have been hard launches, but that doesn't mean anything, as these cards have different architectures and therefore new potential manufacturing problems. Assuming that this will be a hard launch because the company's last few were also presumes that ATI didn't hard launch their last few because they didn't feel like it, rather than because of manufacturing issues.

Hamel wrote:Is the AF craptacular like it was for the 7xxx series? My 7600gt has more shimmering than a trisexual donkey's penis

Mr Bean wrote:Sweet Zombie Jesus! Now if only AMD and Intel would start kicking out this kind of performance increases. We've stopped at 3.4Ghtz for all intents and purposes. AMD will be hitting 3.4 roughly the same time they release the 8 cpu core. And Intel's been stuck in effective 3.4Ghtz range for a year now.

Jaepheth wrote:Were these tests run under DX9?
If so, what will we see with DX10?

I'm wondering if this card will be worth getting (eventually) if I don't intend on upgrading to Vista (hence, no DX10)

Mr Bean wrote:Sweet Zombie Jesus! Now if only AMD and Intel would start kicking out this kind of performance increases. We've stopped at 3.4Ghtz for all intents and purposes. AMD will be hitting 3.4 roughly the same time they release the 8 cpu core. And Intel's been stuck in effective 3.4Ghtz range for a year now.

Ace Pace wrote:

Mr Bean wrote:
Because MHZ is all that matters. Oh wait.

Alan Wake is the first game that will be seriously multithreaded, though. I wouldn't expect UE3 and HLE2 to be any more multithreaded than Oblivion, which shows only modest performance gains from dual core. Alan Wake probably won't be seen until well into '07, and who knows how long it will be before other games start following its example.

I tend to think that single-core people will still be fine into the early parts of '08, when it will start to become necessary to finally upgrade to multi-core.

Anandtech wrote:We asked Tim to tell us a bit about what threads UT2007 will spawn, and he responded with the following:

"Currently Unreal Engine 3 runs two heavyweight threads all the time: one for gameplay and one for rendering. In addition, there are several helper threads to which we offload all of the physics (using Ageia's multithreaded PhysX library), streaming, and several other tasks.

We plan to extend the threading support further in time for the release of Unreal Tournament 2007 next year, to further exploit multi-core PC CPUs. Major opportunities for multithreaded optimization include particle systems, animation, and terrain. Also, since UT2007 uses very extensive vehicle and ragdoll physics, we expect that at peak times during gameplay that we'll have no trouble fully exploiting 4 threads at the maximum detail settings.

There are lots of other interesting prospects. I expect we'll be able to exploit as many cores and Intel and AMD are able to ship in the foreseeable future."

Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:Hmm, well that does sound like true multi-core support after all. Wonder if it will be unplayable on a single-core like Alan Wake is supposed to be.