X-bit labs

Leadtek WinFast PX8800 GTS 512MB Graphics Card Review

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 02/07/2008 | 01:04 PM ]

Today we are going to talk about a graphics accelerator based on Nvidia G92 GPU that should fill in the price gap between GeForce 8800 GT and GeForce 8800 GTX/Ultra. Will the newcomer cope well with this task and is it capable of anything more? Let’s find out now!

Table of contents:

• The Origin of Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB
  
• Closer Look at Leadtek WinFast PX8800 GTS 512MB
  
• Package and Accessories
  
• PCB Design and Specifications
  
• Cooling System
  
• Noise and Overclocking
  
• Testbed and Methods
  
• Performance in First-Person 3D Shooters
  
• Battlefield 2142
  
• BioShock
  
• Call of Juarez
  
• Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
  
• Crysis
  
• Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
  
• F.E.A.R. Perseus Mandate
  
• Half-Life 2: Episode Two
  
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl
  
• Unreal Tournament 3
  
• Performance in Third-Person 3D Shooters
  
• Lost Planet: Extreme Condition
  
• Tomb Raider: Legend
  
• Performance in RPG
  
• Hellgate: London
  
• Gothic 3
  
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
  
• Performance in Strategies
  
• Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts
  
• Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
  
• World in Conflict
  
• Performance in Synthetic Benchmarks
  
• Futuremark 3DMark05
  
• Futuremark 3DMark06
  
• Conclusion
  

As we’ve repeatedly pointed out in our earlier reports, the leading GPU developers ATI and Nvidia take significantly diverse approaches to designing new GPUs. ATI Technologies, currently the graphics division of AMD, has long been putting an emphasis on the speed of mathematic computations and considering other parameters such as texture sampling and rasterization performance as of secondary importance. This developer had been sticking to the 3:1 concept until the arrival of unified-architecture cores as this ratio of mathematical instructions to texture operations was thought optimal.

Of course, the ratio of 3:1 was not a developer’s whim but the result of the analysis of many factors, particularly that a lot of gaming projects were developed for several platforms at once. Game consoles had limited amounts of graphics memory and game developers had to use low-quality textures, putting a stress on visual effects created by means of mathematics-heavy shaders. The product of this development approach was the ATI R580 core that contained 48 pixel shader processors and only 16 TMUs, yet became the best GPU with a non-unified architecture. R580-based graphics cards, ATI Radeon X1900 XTX and later ATI Radeon X1950 XTX, deservedly held the title of the highest-performance solutions with DirectX 9.0c support.

It is also then that the drawbacks of the 3-to-1 concept became apparent because high display resolutions and full-screen antialiasing were widely used in the PC world. Moreover, shaders used to imitate materials contained a lot of texture sampling operations anyway, which put a load on the TMUs and memory subsystem. Nvidia responded to ATI’s success with the release of the G71 core that differed from the previous G70 in thinner tech process and higher clock rates. Nvidia’s combination of 24 pixel shader processors per 24 TMUs proved to be no less, and sometimes even more, efficient than ATI Technologies’ 48/16 formula.

The computing capacity of GPUs has increased considerably with the arrival of the new generation of graphics cores with unified architecture. Execution processors now have to process three types of shaders, and it is impossible to tell the ratio of computing units to texture sampling and filtering units. The performance of streamed processors can only be estimated by indirect evidence now.

Today we’ll discuss the GeForce 8800 GTS graphics card, currently the most mathematically advanced solution from Nvidia.