BFG Tech GeForce 8800 GT OC 512MB

Written by Tim Smalley

November 12, 2007 | 17:05

Tags: #512mb #8800 #bfg #bfgtech #bundle #evaluation #geforce #gt #oc #overclocked #overclocking #performance #review #warranty

Companies: #nvidia #test

BioShock

Publisher: 2K Games

BioShock is one of the best games to be released so far this year and is a ‘genetically enhanced’ first person shooter set in an underwater city called Rapture. The city was created at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean by a man named Andrew Ryan as part of an ideological dream and is focused around a beautifully crafted 1930’s art-deco style.

2K Boston and 2K Australia have licensed and used Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3 to great effect and have incorporated several DirectX 10 effects. These are all controlled via the ‘DirectX 10 Detail Surfaces’ option in the game’s graphics control panel.

As the game is based entirely under water, the developer has made great use of water shaders and, from what we have been told by 2K Games, there were two artists that worked only on making the water look truly stunning. The developers have used DirectX 10 to improve the water ripples when characters move through the water and there is massive use of pixel shaders to create wet-looking objects and surfaces.

Additionally, the DX10 version of the game uses the back depth buffer in order to create ‘soft’ particle effects; this is where the particle effects interact with their surroundings and overall look more realistic. There are other improvements to the game’s engine too – the developers have used DirectX 10’s DCF + texel offsets to improve shadow map filtering, which results in better-defined shadow edges.

As there is no in-built benchmarking utility, we have used FRAPS to record framerate over the course of three 90 second manual runthroughs in the Neptune's Bounty level. We averaged the three average frame rates recorded by FRAPS, but reported the median low framerate instead of the average in order to weed out the outliers. We set the image quality slider to ‘high’, leaving global lighting and Vsync disabled. Anisotropic filtering was set to 16x in the game’s configuration files and, currently, Unreal Engine 3 does not support anti-aliasing under DirectX 10 mode. However, Nvidia has told us that it is trying to remedy this problem with a driver update.

BFG Tech GeForce 8800 GT OC 512MB BioShock

BioShock

1680x1050 0xAA 16xAF, High Detail

  • BFGTech GeForce 8800 GT OC 512MB
  • Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB
  • Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT 512MB
  • Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB
  • Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB
  • ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB
  • ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro 512MB
    • 74.9
    • 44.0
    • 74.4
    • 41.0
    • 72.6
    • 41.0
    • 55.2
    • 30.0
    • 55.0
    • 30.0
    • 54.2
    • 33.0
    • 47.8
    • 30.0
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
Frames Per Second
  • Average
  • Minimum

BioShock

1920x1200 0xAA 16xAF, High Detail

  • Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB
  • BFGTech GeForce 8800 GT OC 512MB
  • Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT 512MB
  • ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB
  • Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB
  • Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB
  • ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro 512MB
    • 62.6
    • 34.0
    • 62.6
    • 34.0
    • 57.5
    • 32.0
    • 47.6
    • 30.0
    • 44.5
    • 24.0
    • 44.0
    • 23.0
    • 39.3
    • 24.0
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
Frames Per Second
  • Average
  • Minimum

BioShock

2560x1600 0xAA 16xAF, High Detail

  • Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB
  • BFGTech GeForce 8800 GT OC 512MB
  • Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT 512MB
  • ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB
  • Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB
  • Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB
  • ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro 512MB
    • 38.0
    • 21.0
    • 37.9
    • 21.0
    • 36.1
    • 19.0
    • 27.5
    • 17.0
    • 27.1
    • 15.0
    • 24.6
    • 13.0
    • 23.5
    • 14.0
0
10
20
30
40
Frames Per Second
  • Average
  • Minimum

Unlike World in Conflict, BioShock showed us some more profound differences in performance. What's more, not only was BFG Tech's GeForce 8800 GT OC faster than the reference card, it was as fast as a stock-clocked GeForce 8800 GTX - all the way up to 2560x1600! If that isn't impressive, I don't know what is for a sub-£200 graphics card.
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