XFX GeForce 8800 GTS Fatal1ty Video Card
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Lost Planet: Extreme Condition Benchmark

The GeForce 8800 GTS Fatal1ty ships with a copy of DirectX 10 game Lost Planet: Extreme Condition, so it seemed like a good candidate for a performance test. Capcom included a performance benchmark in the game, consisting of two different testing loops (snow and cave) that run over and over until you stop the test. The software averages the results of the last two runs of each loop; I let the whole thing run through six times at 1280x960x64 bit resolution with all graphics settings on maximum and came back with the following results:

  • Snow: 18.8 fps
  • Cave: 35.5 fps
The snow benchmark is by far the more demanding of the two tests; the camera moves through a mainly external environment where swirling snow is a constant source of movement. As you can see from the results, the difference is telling: the frame rate struggled a little bit through one high-movement section of the snow loop. However, the card itself seemed well equipped to handle the disruption in data, and the action never collapsed or even stuttered at any point in the test.

Call of Juarez Benchmark

As a part of the US release of its DirectX 10 game Call of Juarez, Techland created a DirectX 10 benchmark. The benchmark has two mutually exclusive settings (multi-sampling and super-sampling) so I ran the test twice. For the first test, I set the resolution to 1280x1024, shadowmap size to 2048x2048, shadows quality to 3, super sampling off and multi-sampling on (x4) and came back with:

FPS
  • Min: 8.2
  • Max: 29.1
  • Avg: 13.7
For the second test, I switched super sampling on (x4) and multi-sampling off and came back with:

FPS
  • Min: 3.6
  • Max: 19.2
  • Avg: 7.1
After poor results by earlier GeForce 8 Series cards on the same test, driver capabilities have finally improved to the point where playing the game with maximum quality and multi-sampling enabled has become possible. The results still aren’t as smooth as they could be with future enhancements, but further software development will no doubt fix this issue.

The latest addition to the Fatal1ty video card line is the strongest competitor yet.


Conclusions

Overall, the XFX GeForce 8800 GTS Fatal1ty is a very strong entry into the 8800 GTS market and one that certainly gives excellent performance, especially as compared to its stock brethren. However, NVIDIA’s recent announcement of the faster, cheaper 8800 GT cards means that all of the older 8 Series cards, including the 8800 GTS, may no longer be worth their price. My recommendation: the 8800 GTS Fatal1ty is an excellent card, so you should give it a close look, but wait until the launch of the 8800 GT before making your final decision.



Highs
erformance boosts put the card on pare with much more expensive options; Very good benchmark scores on DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 games.

Lows
May soon be outclassed by newer, cheaper 8800 GT cards.

Final verdict
Wait to see how the 8800 GT does after it launches, but the 8800 GTS Fatal1ty is worth a very close look.

92%

Oct 30, 2007

Review by Eric Hanson.

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