8800GTX Single Card

For our 8800 single card testing we chose to use 1920x1200 for all tests, all use 8xQ Anti Aliasing and 16x Anisotropic Filtering. In XP the majority of titles are playable at these settings so it’s going to be interesting to see what happens in Vista. Due to time constraints we have chose the 4 games being tested for the following reasons:

Oblivion: Large outdoor environments and HDR.
FEAR:EP : Smaller claustrophobic environments
NFSC: Fast paced action with demanding visual effects
PREY: OpenGL

Other than the leak of one Vista driver in the last couple of weeks Vista has really been a no-go for 8800 users, looking at performance with Forceware 100.54 this may well change that. First up is Oblivion where we note that there are no problems using HDR and AA together in Vista. The performance isn’t as good as XP however this doesn’t stop the 8800 producing perfectly playable framerates at our chosen settings. FEAR is next up and it is in this test that we see the smallest average performance difference from the four tests. Both systems fall below 20fps in this test however when comparing the XP driver to the Vista driver the difference is very small. Need for Speed Carbon is a different story though and in this game we see a substantial difference in performance across all three statistics and this is the first game we have tested which results in Vista users having to reduce their settings when compared to their XP counterparts. Moving on to PREY we see that performance is great across the board and whilst there is a 15% difference in average performance the 8800 on vista is capable of playing at the same settings as it is on XP.