7800 Results at ultra resolutions

[maverik-sg1]

Borrowed off another site - though you guys may be interested in this report - especially valid if you have or are intend to get a monitor that displays 1600x1200 or higher resolutions.

Pixel filling power

Before we get to the gaming tests, we should set the tone by taking a quick look at the theoretical peak fill rates of these graphics cards, because there are some important differences.

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It's not as if the 7800 GTX shouldn't be the fastest card at high resolutions. The GeForce 7800 GTX has a significant edge over the other cards in terms of multitextured fill rate (and pixel shader power) thanks to its 24 pixel shader units, each of which are capable of laying down one texture per clock. One of the most important limitations of raw pixel-pushing potency, however, is that last column on the right: memory bandwidth. On that front, the differences between the cards are fairly small, and the 7800 GTX barely surpasses the Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition.

(Although estimating SLI performance is an inexact science, you can more or less just double the numbers for the GeForce cards here in order to estimate the theoretical peak numbers for an SLI rig composed of two of them.)

We don't see a noticeable drop-off at 204x1536 from any of the cards in 3DMark's simple test of fill rate. This test isn't likely to benefit from features like Z culling, so that's not terribly surprising. Real games, however, are a different story.

 

[maverik-sg1]

Doom 3

We've conducted our testing almost exclusively with 4X antialiasing and a high degree of anisotropic filtering. We generally used in-game controls when possible in order to invoke AA and aniso. In the case of Doom 3, we used the game's "High Quality" mode in combination with 4X AA.

Our Delta Labs demo is typical of most of this game: running around in the Mars base, shooting baddies. The new and imaginatively named "trdemo2" takes place in the game's Hell level, where the environment is a little more varied and shader effects seem to be more abundant.

The cards scale similarly up to 1600x1200, but at 2048x1536, things go a little bit haywire. Two GeForce 6800 Ultras in SLI mode can barely outrun a single GeForce 7800 GTX, and the Radeon X850 XT PE manages to outdo the GeForce 6800 Ultra.

To give you some idea of what we're dealing with, have a look at this screenshot of Doom 3 at 2048x1536 with 4X AA and 8X aniso. A single 7800 GTX spits out images like this at nearly 60 frames per second in our Delta Labs demo—without the compression artifacts.

 

[maverik-sg1]

Far Cry

Next up is Far Cry, which takes advantage of Shader Model 3.0 to improve performance. The game also has a path for ATI's Shader Model 2.0b. Our first demo takes place in the jungle with lots of dense vegetation and even denser mercenaries. All of the quality settings in the game's setup menu were cranked to the max.

The 7800 GTX again looks inordinately strong at 2048x1536 in Far Cry. Here, the Radeon X850 XT PE takes the worst stumble at very high res, relatively speaking.

 

[maverik-sg1]

Half-Life 2

Our first Half-Life 2 scenario takes place on the water, with lots of reflective effects that look pretty. The second is a more typical urban setting. For these tests, I turned up all of the game's eye-candy sliders to the highest settings.

The shapes of the lines on these graphs will open your eyes a little bit. Half-Life 2 is largely CPU limited at lower resolutions on all of the cards, and things only really begin to slow down on the non-SLI rigs at 1600x1200. At 2048x1536, there's a major performance drop for the GeForce 6800 and Radeon X850 XT PE, as well as for the 6800 Ultra SLI rig. The 7800 GTX barely bats an eyelash, providing a most dramatic example of how these GPUs' different peak resolution design points affect performance.

 

[maverik-sg1]

The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay

This game has a Shader Model 3.0-type mode, but to keep things even for comparison to the Radeon, I ran all cards with the SM2.0 path

The GeForce 6800 takes the brunt of it here, falling behind the Radeon X850 XT PE.

 

[maverik-sg1]

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

For Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, we have a demo that includes a nice combo of sneaking around in the dark, using night vision goggles, infrared imaging, and even more sneaking around in the dark. Chaos Theory has a Shader Model 3.0 path, and we used it on the GeForce cards, but we didn't turn on any of the extra effects; it was simply a performance enhancement. Since the game has no shader model 2.x mode, the Radeon was confined to the SM1.1 path.

Since Chaos Theory willingly reports low frame rate numbers as well as averages, we've included those here in the second of our two graphs. The average and low numbers show similar scaling trends, as the 6800 Ultra SLI system very nearly falls behind the other two single cards

 

[maverik-sg1]

3DMark05

Finally, we have the lovely and talented 3DMark05.

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The GeForce 6800 suffers at 2048x1536 yet again, but the Radeon X850 XT PE scales up a little more gracefully, as it has in most of the other tests.

 

[maverik-sg1]

Conclusions

So that's what the performance picture looks like at uber-high resolution with today's most outrageously expensive graphics cards. At the end of the day, performance at 2048x1536 isn't really a good indicator of relative rendering power or likely performance in future games, but it is a very interesting special case. For what it's worth, it seems to me that the Radeon X850 XT PE scales up a little more gracefully than the GeForce 6800 Ultra most of the time, although neither card handles uber-res modes as well as the 7800 GTX. The GeForce 6800 Ultra SLI rig, in particular, suffers mightily at three megapixels, so that you're almost better off with a single 7800 GTX.

One dynamic that we haven't mentioned yet is video card memory. We've had a really difficult time finding a situation where a 512MB graphics card makes much sense. I expect that could change once we subject a 512MB card to the rigors of our new 22" paperweight from hell. It takes quite a bit of RAM to store all of the data needed for rendering at 2048x1536. A screenshot of a single frame alone is roughly 9MB uncompressed. The question is: can a graphics card with a GeForce 6800 or Radeon 800-series GPU really take advantage of that extra memory at high res given their respective two-megapixel limits? Maybe, maybe not. This may be one reason why ATI and NVIDIA have been reluctant to promote 512MB versions of their cards aggressively. Should you have need of running 3D games at extremely high resolutions for some reason, you'll probably want to grab yourself one or two GeForce 7800 GTX cards or wait for ATI's next-generation products. The rest of us mortals will probably muddle along fine with any of these solutions.

 

[The Legend]

Jesus Mav!!

Thats some report you ported over - great reading though - makes me want to go out there and get a unit that will run at those resolutions - I feel underpowered with my 19" units max res 1280x1024.

Anyhow thanks for the information - it's an eye opener on what the GTX can really achieve.

The Legend