![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Sunday , October 28, 2007
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT
The new GeForce 8800 GT gives the GeForce 8800 GTS and 2900 XT a run for the money. We put them to the test, along with the 8800 GTX and Ultra, using the Crysis and UT3 Demos. Did we mention MSRP is $200 to $249?
Crysis Pre-Release Demo
(DirectX 10)
The most anticipated game of the year’s release is finally within sight. The time is near for today’s video cards to get a rather stiff kick in the ass. We have complained that we did not have any games to truly stress our expensive video cards for a while now, and now we have got it. Be careful what you wish for!
We can get an idea of how the full version of Crysis might perform by looking at the just released single player demo of Crysis. This demo is not a “gold” build of the software, and thus at the top of your screen you will see that it says “Pre-Release Demo.” It is possible performance may change between now and the full version game, as well as driver optimizations.
The Crysis demo allows us to play the entire first level in the game with all the DX9 and DX10 graphical effects present. If you run under Windows Vista with a DX10 capable video card the game will automatically run in DX10 mode for you. If you are still unsure that it really is running in DX10 mode there is a way to manually run it in DX10 or even DX9 if you wish.
DX9 and DX10
When you install the demo it will create an icon in Windows Games Explorer. You can find Game Explorer in Start > Programs > Games > Games Explorer. If you right click on the Crysis demo icon you can select to pin it to your taskbar for easy access as we have done. When you right click the icon, either from Games Explorer or the taskbar, you will see two options, either “RunDX9” or “RunDX10.” Just click on which mode you’d like to run in. Alternatively, if you wish to force DX9 without clicking the icon each time you can add “-dx9” (without quotes) to the command line in a shortcut to the Crysis.EXE.
64-bit Support
Crysis also brings with it 64-bit support, which is great to see a new game have out-of-the-box. In the demo you will find two folders in the games root directly, Bin32 and Bin64. As the name implies Bin32 contains the 32-bit executable and Bin64 contains the 64-bit executable. We are using Windows Vista x64 on our test system, and upon launching the game from the regular game icon in DX10 mode you can see in the second screenshot that it is running the 64-bit EXE automatically by default for us. If you really want to be sure though, you can launch the EXE’s from the Bin folders manually. For all of our testing below we are running in the 64-bit version.
Graphic Options
Depending on which mode you are running in, DX9 or DX10, some options may or may not be available. The highest settings allowed in the game is a setting called “Very High” for every graphics options. However, “Very High” is only present when you are running in the DX10 code path. In DX9 the highest in-game settings available are “High.” There is also a “Medium” and “Low” for both modes as well. There are no gameplay differences between DX9 and DX10 rendering modes, only visual image quality differences. In DX10 you will receive better post processing effects including motion blur and HDR lighting quality as well as crisper surface details.
While you can globally set all options to one setting we found it best to customize each option to find the best ratio of high image quality plus playable performance. In our gameplay testing below you will find that, for the most part, we kept post processing at “Medium.” Post processing deals with motion blur and depth of field, in this game there is a motion blur effect added when you move your mouse. With this option at higher settings more motion blur is added, unfortunately unless you have a fast video card this higher level of motion blur can make it feel like your mouse is “lagging.” We found that by lowering it to “Medium” we eliminated this mouse lag feeling. On faster video cards, like the GeForce 8800 GTX though it wasn’t an issue, it had the performance to handle it without a “laggy” feeling. Experiment with this setting yourself if you feel you are having what feels like mouse lag.
Antialiasing and Anisotropic Filtering
From the game menu above you can see that there are in-game controls for selecting the AA levels. We found no visual problems using this feature on any of the video cards tested, other than the large performance hit when enabling it. When you select any AA level in the DX10 code path it will automatically set the Shader Quality to “High” in the advanced menu. You cannot run AA at any setting lower than “High” Shader Quality. This means it requires quite a powerful video card if you want to have AA enabled in DX10. Also, make sure you do NOT force AA from the control panel for any video card, it will cause major graphical corruption; only use the in-game AA settings.
There is a rather sad issue with the way antialiasing works in Crysis. This comes directly from NVIDIA’s James Wang on the use of Transparency Antialiasing in Crysis: ” Crysis handles foliage very differently from normal engines so TRMS/SS won't work. Bit of a shame really. The game has some built-in foliage AA, but it only kicks in in "Very high" quality mode.” Even if you could enable it, the performance doesn’t seem there yet for it anyway with current video cards.
On the issue of Anisotropic filtering, the game does not have any in-game options for this. You will have to force AF from the control panel for each video card. However, currently there is a bug with forcing AF on NVIDIA GPU based video cards in the demo. As you can see in the screenshot above we have forced AF from the control panel and are receiving graphical corruption on the trees. It should be noted it is harder to see this during daylight in the game; it is most visible at night and it does not occur in DX9 mode. NVIDIA is aware of this problem.
On the ATI side of things we were successfully able to force AF with no graphical issues, though it does take a large performance it. Overall, as you will see below, we opted not to enable it so that we could raise other in-game settings. At times we saw as much as a 10 FPS drop in performance with AF. Textures are of such high quality in the game that even without AF it looks very good.
Driver and SLI
We are using NVIDIA provided ForceWare driver 169.01 which is built specifically for Crysis singleplayer demo performance. It should also be noted that the demo currently does NOT support SLI in any way, shape or form. If you have an SLI setup disable SLI because leaving it enabled can in fact potentially hurt performance. The full version game will support SLI with a game patch according to NVIDIA. For the Radeon HD 2900 XT we are using the latest Catalyst 7.10 drivers.
Testing Procedure
For our run-through we played through near seven minutes of the level included in the demo. We made use of weapons fire and had opponents firing on us taking on damage, along with use of various suit features. We also exploded a few barrels, got friendly with the water and ran-through densely populated forests. In the graphs below you are going to see a lengthy period of low performance, this was the absolute worse it got in the game, and in all the video cards we tried to keep that above 20 FPS which we found playable. This game has a unique feel, and 24 FPS and up doesn’t feel so unplayable like some other games. Also in the graphs you will see short spurts where the framerate dips down like spikes, this is due to the automatic save game points in the game and do interfere with the FPS.
DX10
In this set of testing we are running the game in DX10 mode. As noted above there is a bug with AF with GeForce 8 series, so AF is disabled, and with the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT it just simply did not have the performance to handle it without sacrificing other in-game settings.
We started testing Crysis by cranking up all the in-game options to their highest levels at 1600x1200 and backing down until we found the highest playable settings. Let’s first start by talking about what we found with the 320 MB and 640 MB GeForce 8800 GTS in DX10. There was no way 1600x1200 was going to be playable on these video cards without lowering all the in-game options to “Medium” or even “Low” on a few options.
There is a noticeable image quality difference between “Medium” and “High” settings, and we wanted to try and maintain a high level of visual quality in the game. We found that by reducing to 1280x1024 we were able to increase most of the in-game settings to “High.” The only three we needed to lower were shadow quality, post processing and shader quality. We found that shader quality took a rather big hit on performance at “High” on every video card, and second to that was the shadow quality.
We saw absolutely no performance difference between the 320 MB and 640 MB GeForce 8800 GTS in this game. The video cards just aren’t powerful enough to push the game to settings where the framebuffer size would make a difference apparently.
With the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT we were quite surprised at its performance, which was actually slightly faster than both GeForce 8800 GTS video cards. Still, we found the same highest playable settings with everything on “High” except shadows, shader quality and post processing. As we mentioned, AF does work with the 2900 XT. However, we saw a rather large 10 FPS difference comparing No AF to 8X AF at these settings tested above.
Now we come to the new card on the block, the GeForce 8800 GT 512 MB. There is no question about it; it is faster than the 640 MB GeForce 8800 GTS. We were able to run at 1600x1200 on the GeForce 8800 GT versus 1280x1024 on the GeForce 8800 GTS. As you can see in the graph the performance is exactly the same running at a higher resolution on the GeForce 8800 GT.
We toyed with enabling higher quality settings, and at 1280x1024 you could enable “High” shadows or “High” shader quality, however we felt that raising the resolution to 1600x1200 improved our experience more over 1280x1024. Looking at the graphs above the GeForce 8800 GT is faster than the GTS and almost as fast as the GTX.
Looking at the GeForce 8800 GTX we were also able to run at 1600x1200 with everything on “High” except for shader quality. Alternatively you could switch and set shadow quality on “Medium” and post processing on “Medium” and then shader quality on “High”, though we felt increasing the shadows provided a better visual improvement. That means the only difference between the GeForce 8800 GT and 8800 GTX in this game are a couple of in-game option settings! That’s damn impressive on the part of the GeForce 8800 GT.
DX9
In this set of testing we are running the game in DX9 mode.
We were surprised in that we did not find any large performance differences between DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 in this game. We thought DX9 might be a whole lot faster, but it just wasn’t, performance seemed to be close, with only some slight differences. We have direct apples-to-apples DX9 vs. DX10 graphs below.
The new GeForce 8800 GT did slightly better performance-wise in DX9 mode and we were able to set shadow quality and post processing to “High.” We still have to leave shader quality at “Medium” however. With these settings we are definitely beating both GeForce 8800 GTS video cards. Those two video cards didn’t change in performance at all when playing in DX9. We were not able to increase any in-game settings because their performance did not improve, it seems between DX9 and DX10 you will get the same performance out of the 8800 GTS.
The Radeon HD 2900 XT though really surprised us; we did see a performance increase by running in DirectX 9 mode. In fact, this card gained the most performance moving down to DX9 mode. We were able to move from 1280x1024 in DX10 to 1600x1200 in DX9, with the same in-game settings.
The GeForce 8800 GTX, to no surprise, offered the best performance in DX10 and here also in DX9. We were able to run the game at the highest possible settings in DX9 which is everything on “High” at 1600x1200. The game was breathtaking; even in DX9, with all settings maxed out. As you can see the new GeForce 8800 GT is very close to the GTX, the only difference is the shader quality.
DX10 vs. DX9 Performance
Below we are running an apples-to-apples test in Crysis demo to compare DX9 versus DX10 performance on the Radeon HD 2900 XT and GeForce 8800 GT. In order to do this we had to run all the in-game settings at “High” since that is the highest setting allowed by DX9.
As you can see, the Radeon HD 2900 XT is showing the most overall performance difference between DX9 and DX10. The GeForce 8800 GT, at best, gained 5 FPS by lowering to DX9 mode. These results are quite interesting and show that DX10 really isn’t that much slower than DX9 in Crysis, a result we know many of you have wanted to know.
Image Quality
DirectX 9 vs. DirectX 10
First we wanted to examine DX9 image quality versus DX10 image quality. To do so we are running the game with all options at “High” in DX9 mode and in DX10 mode.
In the first screenshot we see that there is a slight difference in the shadow on the edges, they are a tad smoother in DX10. The shadow also appears to be darker in DX10 due to a slight lighting difference. In the second screenshot we are comparing the depth of field effect and in the third screenshot motion blur and we see no differences between DX9 and DX10 at the “High” settings. In the fourth and fifth screenshot we are looking at lighting quality and lighting quality with water and again see no noticeable differences between DX9 and DX10. The benefits that DX10 brings to this game visually are not realized until you enable the “Very High” quality settings as you can see below.
DX10 High Quality vs. DX10 Very High Quality
In these tests below we are looking at image quality to see what “Very High” quality brings to the table over “High” quality in DX10.
In the first screenshot the very first thing you will notice is that the edges are much smoother at “Very High,” there is also a difference in the color tone which is due to the higher quality lighting used in “Very High.” The second and third screenshot emphasize this lighting difference. Using the “Very High” settings you will find that the atmosphere is much richer with better volumetric lighting and a better overall natural color tone. The effect called “God Rays” is also present using “Very High” quality settings. Still screenshots do not do it justice; it is best experienced in motion.
In the fourth screenshot we have a comparison of the depth of field effect. There are noticeable differences between “High” and “Very High.” If you look at the ground and the rock in the foreground you will find that with “Very High” quality there is greater detail visible on these surfaces. There is also a shadow added that reflects off the water on the rock in the upper left of the image and a more natural overall color tone. In the final screenshot the most obvious difference is that the rocky ground surface is more crisp in “Very High” and there is better contrast as you look into the distance through the vegetation. Overall “Very High” provides a phenomenal visual experience; the only problem right now is that no video card can run at these settings at any reasonable resolution.
ATI vs. NVIDIA Quality
Finally we can look at ATI versus NVIDIA image quality to see if there are any differences. We are going to run the 2900 XT and 8800 GT at “Very High” setting in DX10 to see if there are any differences with all the features enabled.
Out of all the screenshots the only one we noticed anything different on is the fourth picture comparing depth of field. If you look at the rock in the upper left of the image it has a shadow reflecting off of the water. There is a difference in this shadow’s quality, on the Radeon HD 2900 XT it appears like depth of field is working on it to make it appear out of focus, but on the 8800 GT this shadow is much sharper in detail. We are unsure which is “correct,” but it is a small image quality difference that is rather hard to notice when you are actually playing the game.
Other than that we saw no differences in DX9 or DX10 in this game between the 2900 XT and GeForce 8 series in terms of visual quality while playing. Motion blur, shadows, HDR lighting and all effects seemed to be working well on all video cards.