Impressions and benchmarks

So for our game selection we keep things simply. We can fire off Crysis in a lower DX mode but the texture packs etc would kill the 9800 just or its 512MB framebuffer. Since we try to show the GPU performance, we'll use a handful of the titles that we know both cards have enough framebuffer for.

Here is where we begin the benchmark portion of this article, but first let me show you our test system plus the software we used.

Mainboard

MSI Big Bang XPower X58

Processor

Core i7 965 Extreme @ 3750 MHz

6144 MB (3x 2048 MB) DDR3 Corsair @ 1500 MHz

Power Supply Unit

1200 Watt

Software

Windows 7 64-bit SP1
DirectX 9/10/11 End User Runtime (latest available)
NVIDIA GeForce 306.23

• Level Ranch Small
• high-quality DX10 mode
• 8x AA (Anti-aliasing)
• 16x AF (Anisotropic Filtering).

At default for all our game tests the image quality settings are fairly high. With that fact in mind I recommend you for objective reasons to continue to focus on 1280x1024 throughout this article, that's where the graphics memory hardly is issue.

Overall you'll notice a 350~400% performance increase.

• Level Contingency
• 4x Anti-Aliasing
• 16x Anisotropic Filtering
• All settings maxed out

COD MWF2 is probably the best comparative title throughout this article as it doesn't pose severe limitations for the 9800 GT. It's quite a difference where mainstream performance has grown to.