NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB

NVIDIA System Setup

• BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTS OC 320MB – operating at its default clock speeds of 550/1300/1600MHz using Forceware 97.92 WHQL;
  
• MSI NX8800GTS-T2D320E – operating at its default clock speeds of 500/1200/1600MHz using Forceware 97.92 WHQL;
  
• EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTS Superclocked 320MB – operating at its default clock speeds of 575/1350/1700MHz using Forceware 97.92 WHQL;
  
• BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTS OC 640MB – operating at its default clock speeds of 550/1300/1600MHz using Forceware 97.92 WHQL;
  
• EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTX – operating at its default clock speeds of 575/1350/1800MHz using Forceware 97.92 WHQL.

Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (operating at 2.93GHz - 11x266MHz); Asus Striker Extreme motherboard (nForce 680i SLI); 2 x 1GB Corsair XMS2-8500C5 (operating in dual channel at DDR2-800 with 4-4-4-12-1T timings); Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 200GB SATA hard drive; OCZ GameXtreme 700W PSU; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI standalone drivers version 9.53 WHQL.

ATI System Setup:

• ATI Radeon X1950 XTX 512MB – operating at its default clock speeds of 650/2000MHz using Catalyst 7.1 WHQL;
  
• ATI Radeon X1950 XT 256MB – operating at its default clock speeds of 625/1800MHz using Catalyst 7.1 WHQL.

Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (operating at 2.93GHz - 11x266MHz); Asus P5W DH Deluxe motherboard (975X Express); 2 x 1GB Corsair XMS2-8500C5 (operating in dual channel at DDR2-800 with 4-4-4-12 timings); Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 200GB SATA hard drive; OCZ GameXtreme 700W PSU; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; Intel inf version 7.22 WHQL.

Company of Heroes:

Publisher: THQ

We used the full retail version of Company of Heroes patched to version 1.3.0. It's touted as one of the best real-time strategy games of all time. Not only is the gameplay incredibly good and immersive, the graphics engine is simply stunning, making extensive use of post processing and advanced lighting techniques in the fully destructible environment. It's also scheduled to get a DirectX 10 update soon.

The graphics already look superb, but with the additional performance benefits and image quality enhancements that DirectX 10 will bring, we're expecting it to look even better than it does now. Relic tells us that it plans to make extensive use of the geometry shader, with the addition of things like point shadows and also fuzzy grass support too. By fuzzy grass, Relic means grass that will have micro displacements that break up the detail in the base terrain texturing.

Relic also plans to leverage some of the other benefits to DirectX 10, to improve performance with more graphical features turned on. The developer's plan to add more detail into the world with more smaller object details in the world. Of course, all of these will react with the world and will be fully destructible like every other element in the Company of Heroes world. For our testing, we used the in-built demo to gauge performance - in this rolling demo, there is heavy use of water, lighting, explosions and also masses of vegetation and it represents fairly typical performance throughout the game.

We had some problems getting ATI's cards to run with anti-aliasing enabled, so we have limited comparisons between NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB, the ATI Radeon X1950 XT 256MB and the ATI Radeon X1950 XTX to 0xAA 16xAF at 1600x1200, 1920x1200 and 2560x1600. All in-game details were set to their maximum values.


Down at 1600x1200, the ATI Radeon X1950 XT 256MB matches the stock-clocked MSI GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB for performance. The lack of anti-aliasing support is a problem for the Radeon though, making MSI's card more attractive at this resolution. Not surprisingly, the pre-overclocked cards from BFGTech and EVGA both outperform the Radeon X1950 XT 256MB, but they're slower than the Radeon X1950 XTX.

This is down to the fact we've benchmarked using the "ultra" texture quality setting. With lower texture quality settings, you'll see the 320MB 8800 GTS video cards start to approach the level of performance delivered by the BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB card.

Even at 1920x1200, you'll still get a great gaming experience from the three GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB cards and this is especially true with EVGA's card. All three outperformed the Radeon X1950 XT 256MB, but failed to really trouble the Radeon X1950 XTX or BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTS OC 640MB.

That situation changed at 2560x1600 though, where the EVGA and BFGTech 8800 GTS 320MB cards outperformed the Radeon X1950 XTX and weren't all that far behind BFG's pre-overclocked 8800 GTS 640MB. MSI's stock clocked GeForce 8800 GTS was slower than the Radeon X1950 XTX, but was still considerably faster than the X1950 XT 256MB.

The frame rates were bordering on unplayable at these settings though, so you'll probably want to tweak the quality settings a bit in order to attain a decent gaming experience at this resolution. Having said that, if you've got a Dell 3007WFP, you're probably going to look to power it with something faster than a GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB video card.