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The Verdict
Obviously from a gaming point of view the 8800 GTX rocks ! I mean seriously this bugger is so frighteningly fast that it'll run any game to date with the best ever image quality settings. You can now play games with 16 levels of anisotropic filtering and 16x anitaliasing enabled (if supported) how cool is that ? Framerates will fly sky-high over your screen at any resolution while the 8800 in your PC is screaming at you "is that all you can feed me ?" Yes the 8800 GTX is a very lovely card to own. A card of this calibre comes at a price though. Spending 600 bucks on a computer component just to play games is for a very small audience only. Interestingly enough, it's a large part of the Guru3D.com audience. Have a look in our forums where we track what computer components our audience fills out in their PC profile. A lot of them already own a GeForce 8800 whether that's a GTS or GTX.
We still need to learn though how well the card will perform with DirectX 10 and while Windows Vista has not yet released to retail (consumer) in the OEM business & developer segment there are already many people that have it in there possession and installed as yes, in that segment (business) Vista is already available.
Despite the fact that Vista has not gone retail for the consumers, we can't deny that it's already released for a large number of users. Why am I saying this ? Because at this very moment Vista driver support from NVIDIA is really dreadful. The 8800 cards do not have a working driver. We have so many users in our forums bickering and complaining about the lack of a good driver. Sure, Vista is new and there's a large development curve ahead of us, we all know and understand that. But fact is that NVIDIA launched this product as a Vista READY product.
If you launch an inquiry at NVIDIA you'll get this back:
| "We recognize that many GeForce 8800 customers are eager to use their new hardware with Windows Vista. We've received numerous questions from users, and we've seen your comments and complaints on the forums. Due to rigorous testing requirements to ensure stability and optimal performance, Vista drivers for GeForce 8800 are still in QA. Our driver team and test labs must ensure compatibility across multiple platforms and hundreds of applications, a process that takes several weeks to complete. Please keep in mind that Windows Vista will not be available to end-users until the end of January. We'd like to assure you that Vista drivers for the GeForce 8800 will be available to download when Vista ships to end users at the end of January. Thank you." |
At the end of January ? A small word for NVIDIA. Vista is out for MSDN, TechNet, and roughly the hundreds of thousands users who beta tested it. These are exactly the enthusiast users who buy will buy a GeForce 8800 card. So I think NVIDIA lacking extensively in this segment. I think that's just not okay.
But back to the BFG product review though, the GeForce 8800 GTX. We have one chip with 681 Million transistors with multiple clocked domains within the chip. The Stream processors run at 1350 MHz, the generic core at 575 MHz, the memory at 2x 900 MHz. We can place two of these cards next to each other and double up rendering power (two chips) by placing it in SLI mode. We now have a card that can cope with both DirectX 9 (or lower) and soon DirectX 10 and we now also have a card that not only is a feast to image quality yet also offers give or take x2 performance over the last single chip high-end product (7900 GTX). Quite frankly, that's a lot to swallow. With the additional horsepower you can do a lot of tricks. 16x AA, high-range HDR with AA, improved IQ, decode 1080P HD streams and yeah even calculate physics or other generic purpose functions on a GPU.
The 8800 GTX obviously will eat anything you throw at it and then shout dude is that all? Framerates are flying which means you can enable heaps of eye candy. You start playing your games with a monitor that supports 1600x1200 and then enable 4xAA and 16xAF. I have been playing Prey for a while at a resolution of 2560x1600 (and that's 500% more pixels over 1024x768!) at 53 frames per second with every possible setting in the game set to HIGH. So I enabled 16xAA and at that same resolution I was still playing with an average of 34 FPS. If you are stuck at 1600x1200, 16xAA and 16xAF will get you 67 FPS.
The one thing you have missed in this review is a bit on overclocking. Quite frankly the card was extremely difficult to overclock. We got 20 MHz more out of the core before it was locking up and memory was pretty much the same. So do not expect a massive tweakable card unless,and this is interesting, you grab RivaTuner and start playing around with the cooling fan speeds. So heat is an issue here. I simply boosted the fan speed towards 100% and noticed the graphics core quickly dropping down in temperature. I ran out of time but all of the sudden I could overclock well over 610 MHz on the graphics core. So, play around with that if you please.
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So the one thing we just have not been able to test are DirectX 10 titles and that's really what this card is all about. I love the GeForce 8800 GTX on DX9, but I can only assume that it's going to rock at DX10. And until it's fully supported and games are actually being released I still owe you another review with DX10 titles.
So compared towards the other two GTX models we have been able to make note of one fact, and that's that there isn't any difference in performance or features whatsoever. That makes purchasing a specific brand very difficult. Product differentiation is very important. The BFG GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB is a colossal product in many ways. It comes however at a very steep price tag. It'll offer you a tremendous gaming experience, that's a Guru3D guarantee. And another guarantee is that you'll receive a life-time warranty on the product which gives it an exceptional edge over the competition for sure.
BFG GeForce 8800 GTX
Info: BFGtechMSRP: 599 USD/EUR.
