Date:
Tuesday , December 11, 2007
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTS OC 512MB

NVIDIA launching a new 65nm GeForce 8800 GTS specification today, this time with 128 streaming processors. We have a retail BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTS OC 512MB to look at today in Crysis, UT3, and COD 4 with in-depth gameplay evaluation.

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System Test Setup

For evaluation we are using a Gigabyte X38-DQ6 motherboard. We are using an Intel Core 2 Duo X6800 2.93GHz processor and 2GB of Corsair XMS2 Dominator CM2X1024-8888C4D at 4-4-4-12 2T. We are using the latest chipset drivers available and the latest BIOS at time of evaluation.

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Video Card Comparison Setup

Note that our system setup as changed, we are now using a Gigabyte X38-DQ6 (Intel X38) motherboard. This motherboard does support PCIe Gen2, and our new BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB and GeForce 8800 GT also support PCIe Gen2. We noted that within the system information in the ForceWare drivers it was indicated we were running in PCIe Gen2 on these video cards.

The first thing you will notice is that the driver version we are using is ForceWare 169.06, which seems a bit old considering 169.12 is the latest beta driver from NVIDIA. The reason is that the new beta driver, 169.12, was released before the new GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB video cards were ready, so it does not include the proper support in the INF files. We were instructed by NVIDIA to use the driver included on the driver CD with the video card, which is ForceWare 169.06. Therefore we used this same driver on each video card to compare. Note that this driver DOES include the Crysis water reflection bug fix. There should be a new driver out today with proper INF support on the new 8800 GTS video cards, so performance might in fact be slightly faster than what we experienced here today when you get the video cards yourselves and install the latest beta drivers.

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.

In our tables and graphs in this evaluation the abbreviation “TR MS” Indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency Multisampling quality setting on GeForce 8 series video cards. CSAA indicates the use of NVIDIA’s CSAA AA mode.