Benchmark Setup

The 7800GTX is a top of the line card, so what better way than to compare it to ATI's current top of the line card, the x850 XT PE. A plain jane 7800GTX clocked at stock speeds was also thrown into the mix to see how much better this overclocked version from Leadtek was.

With cards this good, it is expected that one would want to turn on all the eye candy and run at the highest resolutions possible. Thus, with the exception of 3dMark, all benchmarks were performed with 4x AA and 16x AF. This was set in the video display drivers and all other settings relating to image quality and performance were set to their respective defaults. All tests were run a minimum of 3 times and the results averaged. All tests were run with 32 bit color depths.

The Setup

CPU: AMD 3800+ Dual Core CPU
Motherboard: Asus A8N-SLI Premium
Memory: 2 x 1 gig Samsug DDR400 (3-4-4-8)
HDD: Western Digital Raptor 72 gig SATA

OS: Windows XP Professional SP2 32-bit
Motherboard Drivers: nForce 4 version 6.66
7800GTX Drivers: Forceware 77.63 Drivers
X850 XT PE Drivers: Catalyst 5.6 Drivers

We used the following games and demos:
3dMark 2003 build 360
3dMark 2005 build 120
Doom 3 1.3 with Timedemo1
FarCry 1.3 with Tech Report Regulator Demo
Spliner Cell: Chaos Theory 1.04 with Ubisoft Lighthouse Demo

The following tools were used to aid in Benchmarking:

HardwareOC Far Cry Benchmarking Utility
HardwareOC Splinter Cell Benchmarking Utility (we used v1.1 BETA, which adds support for the latest 1.4 patch, and thus PS2 support for ATI cards. It is nearly impossible to find, but here you go)

3dMark 2003

While 3dMark has been involved with driver optimization scandals in the past, it is nevertheless a way to get a general feel for the performance of cards. Keep in mind however, that it is a synthetic test and thus is not the be all and end all of benchmarks.

Default settings 3dMark 2003 score

The 7800GTX is fast, but the Leadtek with its higher clock speed is even faster. The X850 XT PE simply cannot keep up with the performance of the 7800GTXs.

Next Page: (3dmark 2005)

Page 1: Introduction Page 2: Outputs; Specs; NVIDIA G70 Page 3: Benchmark Setup; 3DMark 2003 Page 4: 3dmark 2005 Page 5: Doom 3 Page 6: Far Cry Page 7: Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory Page 8: Overclocking; Conclusion