GeForce GTX 280 review - 19 - Game Performance: Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 & GRID & The Uberclock

Gaming: Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2

Don't mistake the PC version for being a port of the Xbox 360 game. The PC version has larger and different levels than those featured on the Xbox 360, as well as a different graphics engine and style of gameplay.

The game itself looks great and the intricate physics modeling seen in the single-player version is still active in the multiplayer version.

There are all sorts of other interactions you'll encounter in multiplayer.
For instance, aluminum cans litter the street and stepping on them not only kicks them around, but also creates a loud sound that may betray your presence to the enemy.

And here are the results done with the newer GRAW2. Image Quality settings:

• Edge Smoothing Anti Aliasing
• 16x anisotropic filtering
• Dynamic shadows HIGH

up-to 1920x1200 there was no point including data, as everything was really close together. At 1920x1200 we see the GTX 280 render faster (99 FPS) than the GX2 (97 FPS).

At 2560x1600 the GTX 280 pushes 80 FPS, and the GX2 85.

So it's a bit of a trading game win-win wise. The cards are real close to each other though. And fact is, over time the GTX 280 will get faster with newer drivers.

Gaming: Race Driver - GRID

Codemasters has released Race Driver: GRID, offering many Race events to compete in. Word is: "Charge a Ford Mustang GTR muscle car through the iconic streets of San Francisco, race a BMW 320Si in the Jarama Touring Car Race and drift around the docks of Yokohama in a Nissan Silvia S15. Race against 11 friends on your favourite track and test your mettle online or prove yourself in the single player game." GRID is a stunning game with great racing feel, but most of all .. excellent graphics.

Now I'm already giving you a little taste of what we'll be showing you this week as well, a GeForce GTX 280 SLI review. This is Race Driver: GRID - We parked our Toyota Supra at the Okutuma Grand Circuit and engage some racing.

Based of the Ultra image quality settings you are looking at resolutions from 10x7 up to the 4M+ pixels counting  2560x1600. To spice image quality up, we enabled 4xMSAA as well. Alright, we've shown you enough benchmarks to get you a reasonable idea of what the performance will be like. Let's move onward to the conclusion.

Uberclocking das systeem jaaa ...

Before we head into the conclusion I also wanted to show you guys a little extra, likely something other websites probably would never do. See; typically we receive disclosed technology 24-48 hours before a passing of the non-disclosure agreement. This card we had like two and a half week. So yeah, your mind wonders off for a second every now and then, and sometimes diabolical plans then pop into the brain.

Since we had a little more time to do some geeky stuff for you guys I grabbed some components, started overclocking and tried to break my personal 3DMark Vantage record. You guys interested in this ? Sure you are.

So I grabbed the phone and called up Intel. 'Hey Guys, I need an Penryn based processor that can overclock massively'. Meep meep, roadrunner at the door .. (Coyote opens door) a nice engineering sample Core 2 Quad Extreme QX 9770 arrived at my doorstep. Then I took the memory and mainboard from our last nForce 790i SLI Ultra review. Also, earlier last week we published a heatpipe CPU cooler shootout remember ? I took the best performing cooler from that test, the Tuniq Core Contact.

All components together form a near perfect symbiosis for a nice overclocked system. At this point I was afraid how much money normally we already had to spend on this rig .. but hey, this isn't about money any longer ... this is the quest for the almighty e-peen, bragging rights !

Okay I then setup the system. After spending a minute or five (I just love the nForce 790i overclocking capabilities) I had the processor running pretty darn stable at 4200 MHz on all four cores, on a frickin air cooler. Seriously, I laughed my ass off, that's done on a 35 EUR costing heatpipe cooler (I mentally block out the three grand on other components okay?).

Time to run 3DMark Vantage and see where we'll end with the default score now.

Now as you can see, the processor does have an effect on 3DMark Vantage for sure, apparently even on the GPU score.  The overall score now bumps to 11275 points and the GPU score to 10141.

Oh .. and the numbers to your right .. that's just a little taste of an article you can expect on Wednesday.