Gears of War made a name for itself as a graphical masterpiece on the Xbox 360. The game hasn't lost anything in its console-to-PC conversion. Gears of War is chock full of eye-candy and rather heated squad-based combat. Powered by the Unreal Engine 3, Gears of War supports the latest graphical effects, but it also inherits the 62 fps limit imposed by the UE3 engine.
Anti aliasing is not supported in when using the DirectX 9 rendering route as the UE3 engine uses deferred shading to increase the performance of dynamic lighting and shadows.
Gears of War Settings
The gameplay benchmark was performed during a heated sequence in Act 1 where several locust sinkholes appeared, surrounding the four man squad within an water fountain acting as an impromptu defensive perimeter.
Gears of War Results
Game performance was extremely smooth with all the settings cranked to the max. I played through the entire game at this setting and never once did I notice any performance slowdowns with the XFX GeForce 8800 GT XXX. Since gaming at 1920x1200 was just below the capped frame rate, results from lower resolutions were dropped as they would be extremely similar.
CALL OF DUTY 4: MODERN WARFARE
Call of Duty 4
The Call of Duty franchise experiences a change of setting with the latest installment of the popular World War II shooter as it is set within the current timeframe, explaining the Modern Warfare subtitle. Call of Duty 4 is one of the dwindling number of recent games released using the OpenGL API.
Call of Duty 4 Settings
The benchmark consisted of the opening cinematic scene of the game as displayed by this video, followed by entering and exiting the ship's crew quarters and examining the environment during the intense rainstorm.
Call of Duty 4 Results
The XFX GeForce 8800 GT XXX performs admirably in all situations within Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. While the performance hit of enabling 4x anti aliasing is significant at 1680x1050, it's only 3 fps lower than at 1920x1200. With such a small difference, who wouldn't want to play at the higher resolution? The minimum frame rate reached is a roughly half of the average frame rate at every setting, which will provide for a smooth gaming experience when these situations are reached.
CONCLUSION
The NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT is a great performer and does so at a very competitive price. The introduction of the HD-content accelerating PureVideo capabilities into more powerful GPUs is a welcome feat. The XFX GeForce 8800 GT XXX 512 MB takes the standard 8800 GT to new heights with the factory overclocked core, shader and memory speeds, the solid bundle that ships with the card and the outstanding double-lifetime warrantee. I really like the fact that XFX has chosen to include a recently released full version DirectX 10-capable game within their bundle, which is something that sets it apart from other manufacturers.
There was a fairly big gap between the price and performance of the GeForce 8800 GTS and the GeForce 8600 GTS. The GeForce 8800 GT fills that price gap nicely, but also provides performance that is close to its more powerful sibling.
A quick search of the nV News Price Grabber shows that availability of GeForce 8800 GT-based cards has increased, and with that we've seen a reduction in prices making the XFX GeForce 8800 GT XXX even more attractive.
All in all, the XFX GeForce 8800 GT XXX is a Grand Slam with its combination of price, performance, features, warrantee and power consumption.
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