The GeForce 8800 GTS with 320 MB memory

BFG GeForce 8800 GTS 320 MB OC edition
Pricerange 299-339 EUR/USD
Info: BFGtech

XFX GeForce 8800 GTS 320 MB XXX edition
Pricerange 299-339 EUR/USD
Info: XFX Graphics

Nothing is a secret anymore in the hardware industry is it ? I think roughly a month ago the first rumors hit the internet already about today's tested product series. It's quite amazing how hard it seems to be to keep information under control. Yes, hello everyone and welcome to the what is supposed to be the easiest review I have ever written !

Easy you ask ? Yeah man .. easy! See, you take the 640 MB model GeForce 8800 GTS, take away half it's memory, lower the price to roughly 300 USD/EUR and that's EXACTLY what the GeForce 8800 320 MB GTS is. So that makes this an easy review, right ?

Ehm no, not really. As you'll notice in our conclusion this product is really complex to test and compare. Now if you have been following Guru3D.com for a longer time-frame then you know that framebuffer (the local memory on your graphics card) is a very important item for any graphics card. You should also know that less framebuffer always has been an issue for complex image quality enhancements like anti-aliasing. So if you cut away 320 MB of memory from a 640 MB product; at what resolution will that start to take it's toll ? That's exactly what we'll be investigating today.

So, again I hear you asking, ehm but Hilbert dude, bro, mate (and the few girls out there: your royal cuteness), is there really no other difference to be found in the number of shader (stream) processors ? No my fellow hardware enthusiast gamers, it's up-to the transistor count identical to that 640 Mb model. I'll even take it up a notch, if you purchase a faster clocked model of the 320Mb card then it'll produce even better performance than the 8800 GTS 640 Mb model. Well, until you run out of memory that is. So that's a very interesting thing to look at. Today we'll be looking at two brands of the GeForce 8800 320Mb; obviously compare it to the default clocked 640 Mb model, see at what resolution the framebuffer limitation kicks in, and have a look what default faster clocks actually are doing in terms of performance over that 640 Mb model.

Therefore we took BFG's GeForce 8800 GTS 320 MB card, the OC model, and we also snagged the "XXX" edition of this card from XFX and we'll have a look at how well they perform in games with the industry standard setting in AA and AF.

This should be an interesting read. Oh and hey, we snagged two cards  from BFG so we'll seat them in an SLI compatible mainboard and look at a little SLI action as well.

Let's have a looksie. Next page please.