GeForce 7950 GX2 Retail Round-up

For gameplay evaluations on a CRT, please head back to our CRT performance section.

Call of Duty 2:

Publisher: Activision

We used the full version of Call of Duty 2, patched to version 1.3. The game makes use of some awesome effects and is generally very graphically intense and immersive. That's helped by the tremendous smoke effect that Infinity Ward have created - it's better than anything we've ever seen before. There are also real time shadows and a subtle HDR lighting effect too.

The gameplay is not as linear as the first version of Call of Duty, and Infinity Ward has ditched the rather old Quake 3 engine in favour of creating its own proprietary graphics engine to render the effects. There is something about the game that makes it very intense and you often find yourself having to take a break from the action because you're too overwhelmed by its immersiveness and intensity.

We used a four minute portion of the first level in The Battle of El Alamein, starting the clock from the beginning of the battle, completing the missions in the same order, stopping the frame rate recording when we had played four minutes of the level. We ran this three times to check that our results were consistent.

The Optimise for SLI option was enabled on the GeForce 7950 GX2's and it was disabled on the BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC and Sapphire Radeon X1900XTX video cards.

Due to a problem with the Forceware 91.31 driver, we controlled anti-aliasing from the driver control panel on all NVIDIA video cards. When using the application's anti-aliasing controls, we experienced half the performance of 2xAA - using driver-controlled anti-aliasing set to 4x, we experienced frame rates closer to where we would expect using the in game controls. We checked image quality between the driver-controlled and application-controlled 4xAA and there was no noticeable difference.

We checked the performance of the Sapphire Radeon X1900XTX using both application managed and driver-controlled 4xAA, and the performance difference between the two was within our test error margins. The results reported here are the 'application controlled' results.

The pre-overclocked XFX GeForce 7950 GX2 570M XXX Edition was able to deliver a higher playable frame rate with higher anti-aliasing settings than the reference clocked GeForce 7950 GX2. The difference was literally the difference between transparency supersampling and transparency multisampling - every other setting remained the same.

XFX's 570M XXX Edition was also slightly smoother than the reference clocked 7950 GX2, too - the frame rate never dropped below 25 frames per second on XFX's flagship card, while there were a couple of instances where the reference-clocked GeForce 7950 GX2's frame rate dropped below that, causing a bit of pausing.

However, this wasn't as bad as the pausing we experienced on the BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC - there was one instance where the frame rate dropped below 20 frames per second for a brief moment. This was with the details turned down quite a bit, too. We had dynamic lights and textures set to the middle value. The Sapphire Radeon X1900XTX faired a little better, delivering a reasonably smooth frame rate with high in game details. Texture detail still had to be lowered, but dynamic lighting remained set to the highest setting.

Apples to Apples - 1920x1200 4xAA 8xAF

The performance of the GeForce 7950 GX2 was in another league to the BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC and Sapphire Radeon X1900XTX.