My 7800GT vs X800XL Gaming Comparison (26 games benchmarked!)

[BFG10K]

My best comparison ever, if I do say so myself.

Click.

 

[thegimp03]

Very nice...took a lot of work.

 

[otispunkmeyer]

"Call of Duty 2: 6xAA is not forced when using the DirectX 7 path."

lol why would u want to use DX7 with those cards? good write up though

with you on the SS2 issue though my 7800's in SLI also seem to not play that game as well as it should in D3D mode

 

[Corporate Thug]

Originally posted by: otispunkmeyer
"Call of Duty 2: 6xAA is not forced when using the DirectX 7 path."

lol why would u want to use DX7 with those cards? good write up though

with you on the SS2 issue though my 7800's in SLI also seem to not play that game as well as it should in D3D mode

to get better framerate?

 

[otispunkmeyer]

Originally posted by: Corporate Thug

Originally posted by: otispunkmeyer
"Call of Duty 2: 6xAA is not forced when using the DirectX 7 path."

lol why would u want to use DX7 with those cards? good write up though

with you on the SS2 issue though my 7800's in SLI also seem to not play that game as well as it should in D3D mode

to get better framerate?

i know that, but the cards are very capable at DX9 so

 

[BFG10K]

Not in Call of Duty 2. If I was to bench the same settings I used in the DX7 path I'd probably get about 5 FPS if even that.

Like I explained in the the review I'd need to use about 640x480 or 800x600 with no AA to match the performance I was getting under DX7.

Let's see, either 640x480 or 800x600 with no AA under DX9, or 1920x1440 with 4xAA under DX7. I'll take the latter thanks; the performance hit is far too high to justify a little normal mapping.

 

[Steelski]

nice comparison. thanks for taking the time with all those benches. Do you work from home?

 

[orangat]

I'd like to see a comparison at moderate resolutions, 1024x768 - 1280-1024 instead of superhigh ones. I think the difference much less at those res.

 

[xtknight]

Quake 2 1920x1440x4 1920x1440x4
Crusher 51.40 307.10

lol...wow...that's a raping right there. ATI always had that bug and they still haven't fixed it or was it introduced in a new release and never fixed since? I never noticed abysmal performance on my old Radeon 9500 PRO, but of course I'm only playing at 12x10 4xAA.

Quake crashes? You using GLQuake? Maybe you could give tenebrae a shot. Due to it's unoptimizedness, it seems to work current cards pretty hard (at least it did with my old 6800NU at full settings).

With COD2 demo and my old 6800NU, I could play 1280x1024 on DX9, full settings with no AA (can't remember if it was no AA or 4xAA) at 20 FPS or so. (I actually got through the COD2 demo at 20 FPS.) I haven't tried with my 7800GT.

The next RTCW will be a great test for these cards. I believe it's going to be OpenGL as well.

Is there anything you miss going from X800XL to 7800GT? Less/more shimmering? Better/worse AA? Better/worse AF? I mean obviously you wouldn't miss having more shimmering for example, but what's the IQ difference between the cards, if any at all?

Thanks-great comparison as usual.

 

[classy]

Nice work, but absolutely worthless, sorry. 80-90% of most people don't game at those resolutions. Most are still at 10x7 or 12x10. Even 16x12 is not overly popular because you need a good monitor for that resolution or beyond. Your comparison is just not useful at those resolutions.

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: classy
Nice work, but absolutely worthless, sorry. 80-90% of most people don't game at those resolutions. Most are still at 10x7 or 12x10. Even 16x12 is not overly popular because you need a good monitor for that resolution or beyond. Your comparison is just not useful at those resolutions.

You wanted him to benchmark everything at 10x7 12x10 and hit the CPU/mem ceiling and get all the same numbers?

 

[CP5670]

Nice benchmarks. Great to see Descent 3 there. :thumbsup: I guess you weren't able to get it to run in a higher resolution using the -width and -length command lines? It won't work for me either, at least with 20x15. The text/menu problems you mentioned can be fixed by using the OpenGL mode though.

I'm surprised Jedi Academy runs so well for you. It doesn't work with SLI so I had to use only one card for it, and it still stuttered in some maps at 20x15 with no AA, which I'm guessing is less stressful than 19x14 with 4x AA. I guess it really depends on the map used.

Like I explained in the the review I'd need to use about 640x480 or 800x600 with no AA to match the performance I was getting under DX7.

Let's see, either 640x480 or 800x600 with no AA under DX9, or 1920x1440 with 4xAA under DX7. I'll take the latter thanks; the performance hit is far too high to justify a little normal mapping.

Yeah, I find that even two GTs are too slow for this game in DX9 mode except in very low resolutions. I don't know why the DX9 mode performs like this. There is nowhere near enough of an image quality difference from DX7 mode to warrant that kind of performance hit.

 

[nRollo]

Very nicely done BFG10K. Congrats on the new card.

 

[apoppin]

nice review . . . excellent upgrade
:thumbsup:

 

[grimlykindo]

Great review! I also made the upgrade from a X800XL to a 7800gt - It blew me away what a difference there is between these cards. Plus I sold my X800XL for $225 and got my 7800gt for $300 + COD2! Definately the best $75 upgrade I've ever done

 

[BFG10K]

Do you work from home?

Occasionally but not usually. I had a few days annual leave recently and that combined with the current weekend gave me enough time to do the review.

ATI always had that bug and they still haven't fixed it or was it introduced in a new release and never fixed since?

It's the point parameters bug that was introduced in about 4.12 or so. According to Rage3D it will be fixed very soon.

Quake crashes? You using GLQuake?

Yes. It's a shame too because I really wanted to test 16xAA in that game.

Maybe you could give tenebrae a shot.

But I can't run that at 16xAA goodness.

The next RTCW will be a great test for these cards. I believe it's going to be OpenGL as well.

Agreed. I absolutely cannot wait for that game.

I mean obviously you wouldn't miss having more shimmering for example, but what's the IQ difference between the cards, if any at all?

I honestly haven't seen much/any shimmering on either card so it's a moot point to me. The only IQ difference I might miss a little is 6xAA but with nVidia I get to use the SSAA modes in older games so I gain something there.

 

[BFG10K]

I guess you weren't able to get it to run in a higher resolution using the -width and -length command lines?

Nope. It appears to initially work but when I run the game it's still rendering a 1600x1200 image with the higher resolution and just adds black bars to the screen edges (i.e. it's like LCDs when they don't scale to fit the screen).

The text/menu problems you mentioned can be fixed by using the OpenGL mode though.

D3D + AA causes the text/menu problems but this is something completely different. Imagine cutting the top left quarter of the screen and then stretching it to fit the whole screen. I can't see three quarters of the original content and what I can see is stretched beyond belief. The problem doesn' t happen with 2xAA and 8xAA so it's definitely a driver bug.

As for OpenGL, you can't get EMBM with that and it makes the robots look fantastic.

I'm surprised Jedi Academy runs so well for you.

Try disabling bloom.

 

[xtknight]

BFG10K:

I got GLQuake working on my 7800GT (eVGA 445/1070, 82.12 drivers). I used RivaTuner to set AA to 16x, AF to 16x, Transparent AA to super sampling, and enabled gamma correction. Also started GLQuake with this command line: glquake.exe -width 2048 -height 1536 -window +gl_picmip 0 +gl_playermip 0 +gl_texturemode GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR -bpp 32

Due to my 1280x1024 LCD I had to run virtual resolution/windowed mode to get 2048x1536 but it does play smoothly with "Quality" selected as mipmap (I didn't try HQ; supposedly little difference and lots less performance but I can if you want). Was kind of hard to get good areas because I could only see a quarter of my screen and used stock settings to move. Here are a few shots (lossless 24-bit PNG, ~1.75M each):

GLQuake 2048x1536 16xAA 16xAF 32bpp

http://xtknight.atothosting.com/glquake/quake13.png
http://xtknight.atothosting.com/glquake/quake14.png
http://xtknight.atothosting.com/glquake/quake15.png
http://xtknight.atothosting.com/glquake/quake16.png
http://xtknight.atothosting.com/glquake/quake17.png
http://xtknight.atothosting.com/glquake/quake18.png
http://xtknight.atothosting.com/glquake/quake19.png

That high 16xRGMS whatever-it's-called mode in nHancer should be interesting to try. Yields about 1 FPS in BF2 but not sure about GLQuake. Anyhow the 7800GT has no trouble with GLQuake at 2048 x 1536 x 32bpp x 16AA x 16AF as far as I can tell.

 

[BFG10K]

Mine still won't run even under Windowed mode. Are you running the 81.98 drivers?

 

[xtknight]

WinXP Pro SP2 and 82.12 drivers.
What it says in console: Quake 1.09 GLQuake 0.97

Mine seemed to run at anything (with 1280x1024x32bpp fullscreen also).

What error/symptoms do you get? Try running with the -condebug switch and look at quake\ID1\qconsole.log.

Edit: how ironic, mine also just crashes (normal XP crash thingy) with -condebug. Without -condebug it's fine. I get this with regular quake.exe:

Quake v1.01 [discrepancy against what it says in GLQuake console]
Locked 1 Mb image
Locked 11 Mb data
malloc'd: 11771904
Exiting due to signal SIGSEGV
General Protection Fault at eip=00043a47
eax=fd33046c ebx=0011d2c0 ecx=0000ffff edx=fd330000 esi=00000054 edi=000d92d4
ebp=001192cc esp=00119228 cs=01a7 ds=01af es=01af fs=01cf gs=01cf ss=01af
Call frame traceback EIPs:
0x00043a47

 

[jiffylube1024]

Very nice BFG. Great job .

 

[BFG10K]

Your driver version is different to mine so I suspect it's a problem with the 81.98 driver.

The error message is the usual "Quake.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience".

The logfile shows no problem other than not being able to initialize IPX, which is normal.

 

[xtknight]

Maybe try resetting to default config or something, I'm not sure. And/or add a DEP exception for glquake.exe.

 

[BFG10K]

Already done. The three most obvious solutions - deleting the config file, disabling DEP and trimming the OpenGL string - have all been tried and failed.

I'm 99% certain it's a bug with the 81.98 drivers but I'm not keen on trying any nVidia beta drivers at this stage.

FYI -condebug is crashing your system because the OpenGL extension string is too long for Quake's buffer.

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: BFG10K
FYI -condebug is crashing your system because the OpenGL extension string is too long for Quake's buffer.

Well that's the first thing that came to mind too (holy mindreading batman). But I set a limit in nvapps.xml (ogl_extension) to '1', and '7000' like Quake 3 and both still crashed it. Maybe if you have console debugging enabled somewhere in your config you can force it off. Don't know, but it seems to work for me as long as console logging is disabled. Sounds like you've already done that though.