Foxconn 8800GTS 320MB Overclocking Edition

Reviews: Hardware

Motherboards | Power Supplies | Memory | Systems | Video Cards

Author:
Editor:
Sponsor:
Published:

Max Slowik
Kurtis
Foxconn
Mar. 27, 2007

<< Previous

Next >>

Performance Summary

It's not really necessary to write a game-by-game summary of how much better the 8800GTS 320MB outperforms the only-slightly-less expensive X1950XT 256MB. The fact is that it does outperform it, by a noticeable amount; it's not marginal by any means.

There were a couple of exceptions: ATI did do better with F.E.A.R and Company of Heroes. Technically. Actually playing the games it would have been a lucky guess to tell which card was installed.

And the fact of the matter is that NVIDIA is using a new architecture and new drivers, so there's a very good chance that they will outperform ATI after another revision or two. And there will be revisions.

I have some real complaints about the state of NVIDIA's 8800-series drivers. They're buggy. Their x64 drivers are outrageously buggy, and not worth a damn. Driver-level settings revert automatically and they refuse to disable adapter-based scaling, which is headache-inducing when using a 4:3 aspect ratio on a 16:10 display. And despite the otherwise wonderful new texture processing, there seem to be problems with high levels of anisotropic filtering combined with enabled color correcting, making colors (like teal and purple) show up on what should be grey metal.

These problems are less present using the x32 drivers, but do rear up if the angles are just so.

For the big widescreen gamers, this card leaves something to be desired. Yes, it's better than damn near everything else, but frankly, it doesn't have a large enough frame buffer to happily handle 1920x1200 with any respectable levels of anti-aliasing. If you were hoping you'd get that for $300, I'm sad to say that's just not the state of things yet. But for everyone running at a tight 1280x1024 or so, it's as smooth as butter.

<< Previous

Page 11 of 12

Next >>

Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: The Card and Bundle
Page 3: Test Setup
Page 4: Testing - HL2 Episode 1
Page 5: Testing - F.E.A.R.
Page 6: Testing - The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Page 7: Testing - Company of Heroes
Page 8: Testing - Prey
Page 9: Testing - NFSMW
Page 10: Testing - 3DMark '06
Page 11: Performance Summary
Page 12: Overclocking and Conclusion

Subscribe to Video Cards [more info]

Add Comment

0 User Comments

Add Comment

To add a comment without being a member, you may omit the password field, but you must enter your name (or nickname) along with your comment. * Denotes required fields.