nV News - MSI NX8800GTX Review and Mixed-Vendor SLI - Page 3 of 9
Review By Mike Chambers - January 23, 2007
F.E.A.R. PERFORMANCE
When F.E.A.R. debuted in of October 2005, one feature that had a large impact on performance was soft shadows. In their F.E.A.R. GPU Performance Tests, AnandTech provides benchmark results from a variety of popular graphics cards, which reveal the impact of soft shadows on performance. For example, at a resolution of 1600x1200, the average frame rate dropped 40%, from 53fps to 32fps, when soft shadows were enabled on a GeForce 7800 GTX.
F.E.A.R.
Click Image to Enlarge - 2560x1600 - 16x CSAA
Using the toggle links located under the following image, a JavaScript applet allows you to view the effect of soft shadows as they are implemented in F.E.A.R. Although the effects may not be of the highest quality, they do provide a better representation of shadows as they appear in reality.
F.E.A.R. benchmarks are based on the built-in performance test. Physics, sound, and graphics settings are documented in the table below.
F.E.A.R. Settings
GPU performance continues to increase at a rapid pace and 13 months later we find that soft shadow performance has been tamed with the processing power behind the MSI GeForce 8800 GTX.
PERFORMANCE AT 1920x1200
Dell's UltraSharp 2407WFP 24" LCD monitor has a native resolution of 1920x1200. At this resolution, the MSI NX8800GTX (blue bar) delivers excellent performance as an average of 58 or more frames per second are achieved in 6 out of 8 settings that were tested. F.E.A.R. responds favorably to an SLI configuration as the average frame rate increases 73% with 4x multisampling antialiasing and 93% with 8x multisampling antialiasing.
Average Frame Rate - 1920x1200
For the minimum frame rate, the MSI GeForce 8800 GTX exceeds 30 frames per second all the way up to 16x Coverage Sampling antialiasing. In an SLI configuration, all results exceed 30 frames per second.
Minimum Frame Rate - 1920x1200
PERFORMANCE AT 2560x1600
Moving from a resolution of 1920x1200 to 2560x1600, which is native to Dell's 3007WFP LCD monitor, results in a 77% increase in the number of pixels being processed. It is at this resolution that SLI provides the greatest benefit as higher levels of image quality can be realized. However, in a single GPU configuration, the MSI NX8800GTX is able to provide adequate performance in F.E.A.R. up to 4x multisampling antialiasing.
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