Date:
Monday , June 16, 2008
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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BFG Tech GeForce GTX 280 OC & GTX 260

NVIDIA’s next-gen GPU has arrived. We game with BFG Tech’s new GeForce GTX 280 OC in Crysis, Age of Conan, COD 4, and Assassin’s Creed. We’ve included the GeForce GTX 260 as well. Real gameplay advantages are to be had, especially in the brand new Age of Conan.

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System Test Setup

We will be using a quad-core CPU based platform with the new EVGA 790i Ultra SLI motherboard and an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 (Overclocked to 3.66GHz), and 4GB of Corsair CM3X1024-1800CD Dominator DDR3 to make sure the system will not be bottlenecking the GPUs.

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Comparison Setup

We are overclocking our CPU from 3GHz to 3.66GHz (11x333) so that we can reduce any CPU limitations.

For the GeForce 9800 GTX and GX2 we are using the latest WHQL drivers, 175.16.

For the BFGTech GeForce GTX 280 OC and GeForce GTX 260 we are using drivers provided directly from NVIDIA for use with the GTX 200 series under Vista x64. These are version 177.26. During our evaluation NVIDIA released an updated driver set to editors, version 177.34; however most of our testing was already completed. The new 177.34 version only contains bug fixes and enables GPU computing on GTX 200 series. NVIDIA states:

This driver enables GPU Computing on GTX 200 GPUs. Various bug fixes are also included. There are no significant performance differences between this driver and 177.26.

Therefore 177.26 represents the same performance as 177.34.

We also have Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista installed.

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. To get a better understanding of what we do, please read this page.

In our tables and graphs in this evaluation the abbreviation “TRMS” Indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency Multisampling setting for Transparency AA. “TRSS” indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency Supersampling.