Date:
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
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EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTS 320 MB Superclocked

EVGA has entered the arena of affordable DirectX 10 capable video cards with their e-GeForce 8800 GTS 320 MB Superclocked video card. Does the extra clock speed make a real-world difference? We test it with today's hottest games and find out!

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Test Setup

For our system platform setup we are using a Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 with an Intel Core 2 Duo X6800 processor at 2.93 GH and 2 GB of OCZ DDR2-800 RAM. We are evaluating the EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTS 320 MB SC GDDR3 PCI-Express video card against the ATI RADEON X1950 XT 256 MB GDDR3 PCI-Express video card.

Article Image

Both video cards were tested at their default frequencies, as you can see above. We also used the latest drivers officially available at the time of evaluation.

Game and Video Card 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.

Wherever possible, we try to force anti-aliasing (AA) and anisotropic texture filtering (AF) from the video cards' respective control panels. Our experience has shown that using control panel options, as opposed to in-game options, usually results in better image quality and less "texture crawling". Therefore, in this article, wherever you see us use AF or AA in the table, and the in-game configuration screenshot does not reflect those AA or AF settings, we are forcing that feature from the control panel.

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

AD AA = Adaptive AA – Indicates the use of ATI’s Adaptive AA on X1000 series video 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 series video cards.

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