reviews Tes Ted. Reviewed. veRdic Tized
66 MAXIMUMPC january 2007
B
eing an early adopter means tak-
ing chances. And since the Nvidia
GeForce 8800 GTX GPU at the
heart of Asus’ EN8800 GTX hits the market
well in advance of DirectX 10, Vista, and
DirectX 10 games, early adopters buying
this pricey slab of technology will give the
wheel of fortune a mighty spin because
no one has a clue how it will perform with
DirectX 10 software.
We covered the 8800 GTX’s speeds and
feeds in some detail in the DirectX 10 fea-
ture story also in this issue (page 26), so we
won’t spend a lot of time covering the same
ground here. But after thoroughly bench-
marking this beast with DirectX 9 titles, we
can tell you this: The EN8800 GTX is one
powerful videocard.
We’re not talking marginally faster than
the best cards preceding it. We’re talking
50- to 100-percent faster than the fastest
GeForce 7900 GTX card we’ve ever tested.
We’re talking as much as 25-percent faster
than two of those cards running in SLI.
We’re talking fast enough to get impressive
frame rates playing FEAR at 2560x1600 on
a 30-inch panel—with 4x antialiasing, 16x
aniso, and soft shadows enabled.
This card is not only faster, it’s also
more capable than Nvidia’s previous best.
The high end of Nvidia’s 7-series cards
were quick for their day, typically hitting
high-water marks ahead of ATI’s best, but
they weren’t capable of rendering AA and
high dynamic-range lighting at the same
time. The 8800 GTX has no such limita-
tion. Nvidia is so proud of this development
that it coined a goofy marketing name todescribe it: the Lumenex Engine.
Nvidia claims its new processors can
deliver 16x full-screen multisampled AA for
nearly the same performance hit as older
boards took to perform 4x multisampled
AA. This advance is the result of a newly
developed algorithm called Coverage
Sampling Anti-Aliasing (CSAA). The new
GPU also supports transparency antialias-
ing to eliminate jagged edges on alpha
(transparent) textures commonly used in
the rendering of foliage, chain-link fence,
and similar objects. When we put Nvidia’s
claims to the test, we found that enabling
the feature in the driver while dialing the
application’s AA setting to 4x resulted
in much-improved image quality with no
more than a 5-percent performance hit.
Impressive. Nvidia delivers dramatically
better anisotropic texture filtering than pre-
vious generations, too.
The 8800 GTX (and the 8800 GTS
reviewed on page 70) supports high dynam-
ic-range (HDR) lighting with 128-bits of
precision (32 bits for each color component:
red, green, blue, and alpha). Another signifi-
cant improvement to the GeForce 8800 is
its 10-bit display pipeline, which allows the
GPU to display more than a billion colors,
compared to the 16.7-million color palette
that an 8-bit pipeline can deliver. Nvidia
is catching up to ATI on this last score,
although the price of 10-bit displays keeps
them out of reach for most consumers.The new GPU scores significantly
higher on the punishing HQV video play-
back test, too. Nvidia finally decided to
give its PureVideo software away with the
card, unlike with early versions of the prod-
uct. Enable hardware acceleration in your
video-player software and turn on noise
reduction in the Nvidia control panel, and
you’ll be treated to great video playback.
But ATI hasn’t been idle on the video front,
either. After a series of driver tweaks in its
latest versions of the Avivo software, we
now score ATI’s high-end cards just a wee
bit higher than the 8800.
Circling back to the opening of this
review, perhaps Dirty Harry said it best:
“You’ve got to ask yourself one question:
‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya?” This is the
best DX9 part we’ve ever seen; will we be
able to say the same about its DX10 capa-
bilities? Right now, we’re feeling pretty lucky.
—Michael BrownAsus EN8800
GTX
A screamer with DX9; a question mark
with DX10$660, http://www.asus.comasus en8800 gtxdirty harry
Compatible with DX10;
bitchin’-fast with DX9 soft-
ware; loads of memory; quiet.
harry & the hendersons
DX10 performance is
unknown (and for now,
unknowable); pricey.asus’ en8800 GtX destroys every dX9 performance record we’ve seen, but we’ll
have to wait to see how it handles dX10 software.9
MAXIMUMPC
KICKASSasus en8800 asus en8800
GtX (1920 X1200) sli (2560 X1600)3DMark06 benchmarks run with 4x AA and 16x aniso; FEAR run with soft shadows on, 4x AA, and 16x aniso; Company of Heroes run with all settings at max and AA enabled.
Tested with an EVGA nForce 680i SLI motherboard with a 2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPU and 2GB of Corsair DDR2 RAM.3DMark06 GaMe1 (FPS) 25.7 28.8
3DMark06 GaMe1 (FPS) 23.6 26.2
CoMPany oF HeroeS (FPS) 82.9 92.9
Fear (FPS) 43.0 65.0
HQV ViDeo 113 113benchMarks