Digital-Daily : Video : hl2-benchmarking

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Half-Life 2 as a benchmark

Results for NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT

NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT Ref GPU chip: NV40 (0.11 micron) Memory: 256Mb Memory type: GDDR3; 256Bit; Samsung 2.0ns Frequencies: 350MHz/1000MHz DDR Bus: PCI-Express x16 Category: Middle PCI-E Price: US$380-$450

This card is one of the scarcest in today's benchmarking - NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT in the PCI-E version. The price is still unknown. The situation with PCI-E cards is curious enough - on the local gamers' "flee-market" in Moscow there are only X800XT, 6600GT on sale, but you have to rush around a lot in search for the upper clan of PCI-E video cards.

These are "system test" results produced with trainst-3dnews with the sound enabled.

The card showed a fantastic overclocking potential and immediately overcome the 400 MHz (core) speeds of the Ultra. For the memory, we were able to set 1100 MHz, that is, with GT you can attain results which beat even the Ultra version.

But that didn't help much in HL2 - as we can see, the architecture ceiling of the game for NVIDIA cards tested with our two demo scenes proved merely 56 FPS with the sound enabled versus 71 FPS with the sound disabled (who on earth plays without sound?), and the 6800GT is already exhausted to the full, as our benchmarking showed.

We emulated operation of almost GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme, but for the real version of the Extreme make there was quite a little bit missing.

Therefore, 71 FPS is just the architecture ceiling for HL2 for this system configuration: processor + memory + NVIDIA video card. But the graph itself proved more sloping - results for higher resolutions came into play.

But in a real game with the sound enabled, we were unable to get the desired 60 FPS with the quality options set to the maximum. The best way out is to give up the "reflect all" option and switch to the "reflect world". This will immediately give a 10-15 FPS boost. Reflections strongly affect the performance.

But admit, the picture on the graph is funny. Isn't it dreadful? - A top-end video card at enormous money which doesn't care at all about resolutions, strongly CPU-bound, depends on the architectural specifics of the game, and can't do anything about it!

ATI enjoyed the revenge for DOOM 3 to the full.

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	Content:
	Console and command-line options System Tests Changing the graphic settings Image quality Benchmarking ASUS AX800 XT Benchmarking ATI Radeon X800 XL Benchmarking NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT Benchmarking NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT Benchmarking ATI Radeon X700 XT Benchmarking ASUS AX700 Pro Benchmarking ABIT RX600Pro+Guru Consolidated benchmarking Final Words Top Stories: MoBo: ECS X58B-A (Intel X58) ASUS Rampage II Extreme (Intel X58) MSI DKA790GX and ECS A780GM-A Ultra MSI P7NGM (NVIDIA GeForce 9300) Intel X58 and ASUS P6T Deluxe MSI P45 Neo2 (Intel P45) Foxconn A7GMX-K (AMD 780G) VGA Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 – a new leader in 3D graphics! ECS HYDRA GeForce 9800GTX+. Water-cooled and SLI "all-in-one" Radeon HD 4830 CrossFire - better than Radeon HD 4870! XFX GeForce GTX 260 Black Edition in the SLI mode Leadtek WinFast PX9500 GT DDR2 – better than GeForce 9500GT DDR-3 Palit Radeon HD 4870 Sonic: exclusive, with unusual features Palit HD 4850 Sonic: almost Radeon HD 4870, priced as HD 4850 CPU & Memory: GSkill high-capacity memory modules CPU Intel Core i7-920 (Bloomfield) DDR3 memory: late 2008 CPU AMD Phenom X3 8750 (Toliman) AMD Phenom X4 9850 – a top-end CPU at affordable price CPU Intel Atom 230 (Diamondville) Chaintech Apogee GT DDR3 1600