DirectX 10 capable games are beginning to appear, but it is unlikely that these early titles were designed from the ground up with the benefits of the technology in mind.
DirectX 10 Performance
DirectX 10 is in its infancy, but recent technology demos from NVIDIA are showing the Windows Vista only API has potential.
GPU TEMPERATURE
According to the Rivatuner utility, the default fan speed of the XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra XXX Edition is pegged at 1600RPM with the fan operating at 60%. At a room temperature of 23° C / 74° F, the idle temperature of the XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra XXX Edition was approximately 61° C / 141° F. Ambient temperature was 49° C / 120° F.
One of the keys to generating heat on a GPU is to enable as many transistors as possible. Transistors are switched on by using features such as AA and HDR. For this test, Oblivion was running with 4x AA and HDR enabled at a resolution of 2560x1600, which resulted in a peak GPU temperature of 85° C / 185° F. Ambient temperature was 61° C / 142° F.
RivaTuner
Gaming with a high-end graphics card on air cooling can increase the temperature of a small room by a few degrees. In some cases, additional cooling can be obtained by increasing the default fan speed of the graphics card. RivaTuner was used to control the fan speed as the controls were protected in the driver control panel applet.
CONCLUSION
Potential owners of the XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra XXX Edition can be confident that their system will tackle any game on the market today at the resolution of 2560x1600. In most cases, we found that 4x AA, supersampling AA, and high quality texture filtering can all be enabled.
However, the same statement also applies to the GeForce 8800 GTX and to a lesser degree the GeForce 8800 GTS, both of which are cheaper that the XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra XXX Edition.
Although consumers balked at the reference GeForce 8800 Ultra’s launch price of $829, a similar situation transpired in November of 2005, when NVIDIA introduced a 512MB version of the GeForce 7800 GTX with a price tag of $759. NVIDIA surprisingly discovered that they could not keep up with demand and prices for the GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB skyrocketed to $800 and up.
The bottom line is that there will always be a high-end market and leading-edge companies like NVIDIA and XFX are in the business of keeping hard-core gamers satisfied. Keep in mind that the cost of a product is relative to the disposable income of the consumer that is purchasing the product.
