![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Wednesday, July 25, 2007
- Author:
- Mark Warner
- Editor:
- Brent Justice
- Google +1
MSI NX8800 GTS 320 MB OC Edition Video Card
We take the highly overclocked GeForce 8800 GTS 320 MB video card from MSI and run it through our Vista gaming tests including Lost Planet DX10 performance. The 640 MB 8800 GTS and 2900 XT are the cards to beat. Which is the best value under $400?
The Elder Scrolls IV: Shivering Isles
(DirectX 9)
Oblivion is the next Elder Scrolls game and the unconnected sequel to Morrowind. It uses the multi-platform Gamebryo game engine. Oblivion features DirectX 9 shaders and Havok physics. The engine supports lush vegetation, soft shadows, and high dynamic range lighting (HDR). Oblivion also features SpeedTree for rendering trees.
The Shivering Isles is the first official expansion pack for Oblivion. With more than 30 hours of new content, it adds a whole new area and a slew of new quests, characters, monsters and equipment. The new area is slightly less graphically intensive as the classic Oblivion content, so players that currently enjoy Oblivion with good performance should not need to lower their playable settings to experience the expansion pack.
For testing, we have chosen to do a manual run-through riding horseback from outside the Imperial City to Chorrol to Bruma. This run-through allows us to push the hardware as much as the game can. While this is an outdoor run-through, we do make sure to test indoor situations in our gameplay analysis as well. We have found that turning on the torch indoors with HDR lighting takes a big hit on performance in some situations. We make sure to test this scenario, and the posted configuration screenshots reflect the results of testing both indoor and outdoor scenarios.
Using the MSI NX8800 GTS 320 MB OC Edition video card, we found the highest playable settings for Oblivion to be 1600x1200, with no AA, and 16x AF. Within the game, the options we found playable were very close to the highest possible settings. The only setting we turned down was self shadows, and those we disabled. However, we did not miss it. Self-cast shadows tend to look terrible in Oblivion. Compared to our previous experience in Oblivion on Windows Vista, we were pleasantly surprised. In that earlier evaluation, performance was lacking in Oblivion, and we sincerely hoped that it had more to do with the hardware than the software. In this evaluation, it proved to be the hardware. Using higher end hardware, we were able to extract considerably higher settings for all three video cards we used.
The NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB, the highest settings we found playable were actually just below what we found playable with the MSI NX8800 GTS 320 MB OC Edition. We found 1600x1200 playable with no AA, and 16x AF. Within the in-game settings, we were able to set almost every option to the maximum available setting. We had to disable self-shadows and grass shadows. Self-shadows were no big deal, but grass shadows are a little bit more noticeable. With grass shadows enabled, the player character, the NPCs, and monsters cast dynamic shadows on the tufts of swaying grass. The difference is noticeable, but certainly not a deal breaker.
In our first evaluation of the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT using Windows XP, the new ATI GPU was well below the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB. In this evaluation on Windows Vista, things have changed. The highest settings we found to be playable on the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT were exactly the same as what we found for the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB: 1600x1200, no AA, 16x AF, and almost all of the in-game settings at the maximum values, except for self shadows and grass shadows, which were disabled.
In the end, however, the improved relative performance of the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT did not change its position. The less expensive video card provided a better experience in Oblivion. The MSI NX8800 GTS 320 MB was able to give us slightly higher frame rates, and slightly higher playable settings than both the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB video card and the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT. The performance difference here is slight, but the price difference is not.
Image Quality
Because we were able to use almost identical settings for all three video cards in this evaluation, the gameplay experience was almost identical as well. The above screenshot comparison illustrates this similarity.