7800 GTX Extreme Edition Head-to-Head

Rome: Total War

Publisher: Activision

In this comparison, we used the full retail version of Rome: Total War, and we've used part of the tutorial battle to record our manual run through. Our test section incorporates several unit movements along with a lot of units in the scene at the same time - it manages to provide a high level of stress on the video card because of the high polygon and geometry counts.

The driver control panel was used to control Anisotropic Filtering, while we left Anti-Aliasing set to "Application Preference" in order to control AA using the title's in-game graphics settings.

Below is a table of the best-playable settings that we found best for each video card configuration. The title is an RTS, so frame rate isn't quite as critical as it would be in a first person shooter, so we have aimed for 15 frames per second minimum and an average frame rate of 40 frames per second.

We saw some quite different average frame rates across the three overclocked GeForce 7800 GTX's, but surprisingly we found that the best playable settings were the same for all three cards. The reason for this is that the minimum frame rate remained the same despite the large drop in average frame rate that was witnessed.

As we mentioned in the Sapphire Radeon X1800XL review on Monday, we found that there was unacceptable texture shimmering when using the default driver settings on all GeForce 7-series video cards. If you don't have time to read that page, I'll sum up here. In simple terms, when you use the default driver settings in NVIDIA's drivers on a GeForce 7-series video card, it looks as if the textures that make up the grass 'swim' along as you move forwards behind a unit.

Rome: Total War also seems to benefit from a combination of shader power and memory bandwidth, as the Leadtek Extreme Edition had an average frame rate of 47 frames per second - 5 frames per second slower than the XFX. The Gainward 7800 GTX Golden Sample had an average frame rate some 9 frames per second less than the XFX Extreme Gamer Edition. With the reference 7800 GTX, we found that we had to lower the level of Anisotropic Filtering to 8x in order to remove the choppiness we were seeing when 16xAF was applied.