G80: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX

Battlefield 2142:

Publisher: EA Games

We used the full retail version of Battlefield 2142 patched to version 1.10. It follows closely in the footsteps of Battlefield 2 and is based on the same game engine, albeit with a few modifications and improvements. The game supports normal mapping, parallax mapping, full-resolution dynamic shadowing, post processing and fog. DICE has also implemented a new enhanced lighting effect that provides a nice bloom effect.

We played three five minute run throughs of the 'Cerbere Landing' map, reporting the median average frame rate. There is no ready way to duplicate testing situations manually in this game, so we felt that taking a typical slice of action from the game was the best way to report our findings.

We controlled anti-aliasing from inside the game if enough modes were available, while we controlled anisotropic filtering from the control panel so that we could enable 16xAF.

24" widescreen gaming:

At 1920x1200, Battlefield 2142 looked awesome with 16xQ AA with transparency super-sampling enabled. The GeForce 8800 GTX simply tore through the game without any performance hiccups whatsoever - we spent some time playing the game online with the card too, finding it to maintain its smoothness at these quality settings. The unified shader architecture seems to really help with smoothness in this title.

Both the GeForce 7950 GX2 and Radeon X1950 XTX were playable at the same quality settings, but the GeForce 7950 GX2's image quality was pretty pathetic compared to the Radeon X1950 XTX and GeForce 8800 GTX. There were many occasions where we experienced harsh mipmap boundary optimisations when using the default driver quality setting. We'd recommend turning the high quality driver setting on if you're a 7950 GX2 owner.

30" widescreen gaming:

The GeForce 8800 GTX extended its performance advantage at 2560x1600 - this is starting to become a trend as we're sure you're aware. The gaming experience was smooth and incredibly immersive with 4x transparency super-sampling enabled in conjunction with 16xAF. We were also able to leave the maximum in-game details turned on too. Simply. Awesome.

On the other hand, both the Radeon X1950 XTX and GeForce 7950 GX2 were unable to attain smooth frame rates with anti-aliasing enabled at 2560x1600. To add insult to injury, we had to lower the in-game quality settings quite a long way too, because we couldn't get our minimum frame rate above 20 frames per second with maximum quality settings. Just like Battlefield 2, Battlefield 2142 suffers from low frame rates and it seems like the engine just doesn't like lower frame rates, as the stuttering caused by low frame rates is more noticeable than in other game engines.