Date:
Monday , February 12, 2007
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTS OC 320MB

NVIDIA’s third GeForce 8 series GPU is ready to be added to their lineup, and this time at a very attractive price point that should appeal to a lot of people. We’ll test the new BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTS OC 320MB against the competition as well as its older sibling to see exactly what the better value is, prepare for some shocking results.

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System Test Setup

For evaluation we are using an EVGA NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI motherboard. We are using an Intel Core 2 Extreme Duo X6800 2.93 GHz processor and 2GB of Corsair XMS2 Dominator CM2X1024-8888C4D at 4-4-4-12 1T. We are using the latest chipset drivers available and the latest BIOS at time of evaluation.

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Video Card Comparison Setup

Since we compare video cards by MSRP at this price range the current comparable ATI video card is the Radeon X1950 XT 256MB. Obviously there is a very large difference in capabilities and performance. Since we are not testing any DirectX 10 games they are however comparable.

We are also going to throw in the BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB video card to the mix so we can see just how much the memory reduction really affects gameplay. This should tell us easily which one is the better value. For example if there isn’t much performance difference the 8800 320MB video card and the 8800 640MB video card, one is going to end us showing to be a much better value depending on what resolution you want to game at. This should be a very exciting evaluation.

Evaluation Setup

Please be aware we test our video cards a bit differently from what is the norm. We concentrate on examining the real-world gameplay that each video card provides. The Highest Playable section shows the best Image Quality delivered at a playable frame rate. We use a high performance system, with a very fast CPU in order to remove CPU bottlenecking.

In our graphs we use some abbreviations to indicate the method of AA or AF being used.

P ADAA = Performance Adaptive AA – This indicates the use of Performance mode Adaptive AA on X1000 series ATI cards.

Q ADAA = Quality Adaptive AA – This indicates the use of Quality mode Adaptive AA on X1000 series ATI cards.

HQ AF = High Quality Anisotropic Filtering – Indicates the use of ATI’s High Quality option for Anisotropic Filtering that is not angle dependent.

TR MSAA = Transparency Multisampling Antialiasing – Indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency Multisampling quality setting on GeForce 7 and 8 series video cards.

TR SSAA = Transparency Supersampling Antialiasing – Indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency Supersampling quality setting on GeForce 7 and 8 series video cards.