![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Wednesday, July 09, 2008
- Author:
- Mark Warner
- Editor:
- Brent Justice
- Google +1
BFGTech GeForce 8800 GT OCX ThermoIntelligence
BFGTech has married OCX with ThermoIntelligence. We're here to evaluate the BFGTech GeForce 8800 GT OCX with ThermoIntelligence in three of today's hottest games. Find out if this supped up 8800 GT has what it takes to compete with the newly released ATI Radeon HD 4850, or is it time for the 8800 GT to take a hike?
Crysis
(DirectX 10)
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 1.2.1 for Crysis.
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 5 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.
In Crysis, the BFGTech GeForce 8800 GT OCX did deliver a slightly faster framerate than its non-overclocked brother. It was about 10% faster on average, in fact. Unfortunately, it was not enough to allow us to improve the gameplay experience by increasing any of the in-game settings. Both the overclocked BFG video card and the standard NVIDIA video card were able to run Crysis at 1280x1024, of course without AA, with 16X AF, and with all in-game settings at medium except texture, physics, shader, and water quality, which we were able to set at high. It was a smooth and enjoyable experience, even at this relatively low resolution, thanks to Crysis' intense graphical fidelity.
The gameplay experience in Crysis was greatly improved by using an ATI Radeon HD 4850. Not only were we able to run Crysis at a higher resolution with the Radeon HD 4850 than with the BFGTech video card, we were even able to increase object detail quality. Whereas we had to leave it at medium, on the two GeForce 8800 GT based video cards, the ATI Radeon HD 4850 had enough performance headroom to allow us to bump it up to high.
In Crysis at least, the clock speed on the BFGTech GeForce 8800 GT OCX with ThermoIntelligence was simply unable to make up for the performance gap between the GeForce 8800 GT GPU and the ATI Radeon HD 4850 GPU.
Image Quality
The following linked screenshots are 1.9 MB and 2.7 MB in size, respectively.
In the two screenshots above, you can see the difference that running in 1600x1200 versus 1280x1024 can make for your gameplay experience. Everything is rendered in fuller detail at a higher resolution. As a matter of fact, the image represented in the bottom half of the second screenshot is rendering about 60,000 more polygons than the image represented in the top half.