![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Monday , January 14, 2008
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Palit GeForce 8800 GT Super+1GB
Palit puts 1GB of GDDR3 memory on a GeForce 8800 GT based video card and we find out how this affects gameplay in Crysis, UT3, and COD4 in both single and an SLI configuration. You guys looking for the perfect hi-res budget card should read up.
Crysis
(DirectX 10)
We are using the full version copy of Crysis. Crysis is a first person shooter that is set in 2019. What makes Crysis unique is the amazing destructible environment and the on the fly customizability of your character and your weapons. Then there is always the graphics quality that will bring even the top end video cards to their knees. We will be playing Crysis in the default APIs for our system, which launches automatically in DX10 mode with the 64-bit executable. We have applied the latest Patch version 1.1 for Crysis which is supposed to improve single video card and multi-GPU (SLI and CrossFire) performance.
As you progress through Crysis the game becomes more graphically demanding; first the scenic vistas, then the weather effects, and finally the final boss all lead your optimized playable settings of the first few levels to become unplayable. Our run-through in the graphs below involves 10 minutes of gameplay in “Assault_Crysis” the Harbor map. This map includes the transition from night to day, tons of explosions, particles, physics, AI interaction and water.
Note that in the graphs, we have lowered our redline to 25 FPS for Crysis. This game is demanding, and low framerates are impossible to avoid, gameplay is also different in this game to where 25 FPS and up feels very playable which is very likely due to the efficient use of motion blur. Note that the down-spikes to 0 FPS in the graphs are due to the saved game points.
Single Video Card Comparison
The GeForce 8800 GT GPU is not the fastest GPU on the block, but it does get the job done in Crysis and allow a high level of gameplay experience for Crysis. We found that 1280x1024 was the sweet spot for the Palit GeForce 8800 GT Super+1GB video card. This allowed us to have “High” Shaders Quality, Physics Quality, Texture Quality and Water Quality.
Though the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB has only 512MB of RAM, it too was still playable at the same level as the Palit 1GB 8800 GT. We were able to play at 1280x1024 with the same in-game settings. As you can see in the graph above both video cards perform nearly identical. It seems that in a single video card configuration the 8800 GT GPU based Palit video card just simply doesn’t have the GPU performance to really show the benefits of 1GB of RAM in Crysis. It is very hard to run Crysis at the settings needed to achieve the benefits that 1GB of RAM allow on a video card. Let’s see what two cards in SLI do below.
SLI Comparison
When we connect two video cards up in SLI we do find a performance benefit. However, the performance advantage wasn’t as large as we had hoped, and certainly not as big as we’ve seen in some other games. Crysis or the drivers still need a good bit of tweaking in terms of DX10 SLI performance.
With two Palit GeForce 8800 GT Super+1GB video cards in SLI we found we could raise the resolution to 1600x1200, but we did have to keep Shaders Quality at “Medium.” Unfortunately, even in SLI, it just wasn’t possible to have the Shaders Quality at “High,” the performance just wasn’t there with the 8800 GT GPU.
With two NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB video cards in SLI we found the exact same gameplay experience in Crysis as we did with two Palit 1GB 8800 GTs. Yep, there was absolutely no difference in performance between 512MB and 1GB of RAM on the 8800 GT in SLI in Crysis. It seems to us that even with SLI, the 8800 GT just isn’t powerful enough for Crysis to show the advantages that 1GB of RAM can provide on a video card. Not surprisingly it seems as though Crysis is shader limited.