Tests
3DMark06

It seems like in every video card review we write we criticize the fact that the industry uses 3DMark06 as the go-to standard for graphics benchmarking. The test is old by now, and it has various deficiencies that just make it not a very good test for modern cards. And yet, here we are, using it again. We really wish Futuremark would hurry and release 3DMark Next (replacement for 06) so we could get a more meaningful synthetic test running on new cards. Please keep in mind with these scores that we are running windows Vista 32-bit, which results in a score decrease from Windows XP. Also, most reviews you will see are using slightly faster processors than our non-overclocked QX6700.


For single cards, the GeForce 8800GTX still holds the throne (8800Ultra would, but we did not include that beast in our tests) in 3DMark06. Surprisingly right behind that is the 8800GT, which beats out the also usually impressive Radeon HD2900XT from AMD. Of course, the 8800GT in SLI ends up with the top score. Scaling with SLI in 3DMark06 in Vista has always been lackluster, and we can see with these results that it still is. The margin with which the single 8800GT beats out the 8800GTS is also pretty impressive.

F.E.A.R. (v1.08)

You might ask why we still use F.E.A.R. for benchmarking. The game came out forever ago and most decently powerful cards handle the game just fine. Well, F.E.A.R. is extremely sensitive to minor changes in hardware. Even if the end FPS scores were not valuable (they are), the tweaking you can do to the image quality settings within the game options is invaluable for singling out various under-performing features on any given card. Also, F.E.A.R. seems to run exceptionally bad in Vista when compared to XP, so it adds an extra element of use to the game. Finally, the built-in benchmark makes it quick and easy ;).


Here you can see that the GeForce 8800GTX remains the top dog. It beats out its closest competitor, again the 8800GT, by a solid 25, 20, and 15 frames for each successive resolution. The real story here is how well F.E.A.R. scales with SLI 8800GTs. We have always found F.E.A.R. to offer a tremendous benefit for both SLI and CrossFire configurations, and it is nice to see that this remains the case in Windows Vista.