Thursday 29th November 2007

GeForce 8800M GTX – first benchmarks

Posted at: 4:50am 29th November 2007 by Clive Webster

We put Nvidia’s first mobile DirectX 10 GPU through its paces to see how it copes with the latest games

Although Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 chips have been doing the rounds for over a year now, the first laptop-friendly versions have only just started to trickle out. Unsurprisingly, their specs aren’t quite up there with their desktop counterparts, with a lower count of stream processors, but Nvidia assured us that they would provide ‘near-desktop performance.’ To find out if this is true, Rock kindly loaned us a laptop featuring the new GeForce 8800M GTX for benchmarking

First off was Crysis, which, to be fair, even top-end desktop graphics chips struggle with when you get into to the top settings. At 1,024 x 768 with no AA and AF and Very High settings, the GPU benchmark returned a minimum frame rate of 11fps minimum, and a 19fps average. Dropping the detail settings to High boosted the minimum frame rate to a still unplayable 20fps, but amazingly we saw a minimum frame rate of 30fps when we dropped the detail settings to Medium. These are the same settings that you’d expect a GeForce 8800 GT to cope with at a playable frame rate, so it’s impressive stuff.

Most gaming laptops we’ve seen struggle to play games at full detail settings at 1,024 x 768 anyway, and that includes less power-hungry games such as Need for Speed: Carbon. However, on the GeForce 8800M GTX we saw an average frame rate of 55fps in this game. A few fitters caused the minimum frame rate to drop to just 5fps, but we put this down to the BETA BIOS and pre-release ForceWare drivers, as the game was generally very smooth. Unfortunately, though, the early nature of the hardware and drivers meant that F.E.A.R. didn’t run reliably, while S.T.A.L.K.E.R. greyed out some of its advanced graphic options, making the test invalid.

However, we did manage to benchmark World in Conflict, which proved a struggle for the 8800M GTX. We initially tested the game at 1,280 x 1,024 with no AA or AF, but got a minimum of 12fps and an average of 27fps in DirectX 10 mode, and only a minimum of 11fps and an average of 35fps when we switched to DirectX 9 mode. Dropping the resolution to 1,024 x 768 failed to make the game playable in either mode too.

Comparatively, the GeForce Go 7950 GTX in the Elite-listed Rock Xtreme 770 only manages a 10fps minimum and 25fps average in the same DirectX 9 test. While the lower minimum could be blamed on the slower 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 of the Elite-list system (the 8800M GTX system has a much faster 2.6GHz Intel Core 2 DuoT7800), the higher average is the work of the GeForce 8800M GTX.

While the resolutions we tested at might seem comparatively low, the GeForce 8800M GTX is easily the most powerful mobile graphics chip on the market. That’s due to its large bank of 96 stream processors running at 1.25GHz and the core clock speed of 500MHz. The mobile GPU also has 512MB of memory running at 800MHz (1.6GHz effective) though it only has a 256-bit memory bus. Nvidia claims the chip has a TDP of only 30W, which is much lower than that of the GeForce Go 7900 GTX, so the new chip could also appear in laptops that don’t weigh the same as a small elephant.

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Benchmark Results

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Comments

To Lightning_Pete........

First off Rock are not the ONLY good laptop manufacturer for games and so called power users. Fool! Secondly if you actually read the article you can clearly see that CPC max out the settings and then LOWER them to achieve a playable framerate. After all you need a level of comparison in a test.

Comment by pveater at 7:49am 4th December 2007

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A 8600 on the laptop model (my friend has a ROCK laptop, which are the only decent laptops for gamers and power users) and it copes alrite on world in conflict, however, custompc trys to max out everything gfx wise, so at the end of the day, its not gonna be an ultra, that even that struggles at higher resolutions in W.I.C. ..... so its not suprising that this is not going to cope very well at 1280x1024 anyhoo it still means COD4 is a good option :)

Comment by Lightning_Pete at 10:09pm 2nd December 2007

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Cool_CR are you on about the performance between DX10 and DX9 in Crysis or the visual difference?? As it seems as though your on about the visual difference to me, believe me there is no visual difference between DX10 and DX9 settings in Crysis, the shadows and effects look VERY slightly enchanced? Also I have 2 8800Ultras and I am playing crysis at Max DX10 setting with 2X AA @ 1920X1200 and the game never dips below 40fps for even when im in huge open areas with hundreds of baddies in my way. I have tried to run the game at the same settings using just one card and I can run the game just fine at 1680x1050 with 4X AA never dipping below 35fps. If you have a GTX then try running the game with No AA this will boost performance tenfold and add easily an extra 10 maybe even 12fps. And trust me with no AA you cant tell the game still looks silky smooth! Only at long distances the object look jaggied but who cares about that most of the time ur looking through your binoculars anyway.

Comment by CPC_RedDawn at 4:00am 30th November 2007

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People people there are areas of the game Crysis that are more demanding than the demo witch my pc breezes through the demo with no stutter at all but latter it feels its age in the large Open maps with hundreds of troops also inside the alien ship hurts my GTX to. And When you say very high is that very high dx10 or very high dx9 as there is a mile of diffrence. also drivers overclocks chip sets and processors all either help or hinder game performance. I play at 1280x1024 with x2 AT but drop to 1024x768 when in the big areas all at very high dx10 GTX for the win.

Comment by Cool_CR at 11:37pm 29th November 2007

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8800GT Desktop

Running an E6600 mildly OC'd @ 2.8Ghz with an 8800GT at stock speeds. I am playing the Crysis demo at High settings on everything and at 1280x1024. Frame rate never seems to drop below 25 and most of the time is around 40fps.

Comment by do_it_anyway at 9:07pm 29th November 2007

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Any idea how this card compares to a pair of SLI 8700s? I know its more expensive but performance-wise, I cant rummage up much info on either!

Comment by DarkGarlic at 8:23pm 29th November 2007

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desktop 8800gt on MEDIUM settings!?...

... at 1024x768 in crysis!?? My 8800gts will kick out a fully decent frame rate on all very high settings(except shaders) at 1680x1050, And thats supposedly an inferior card. to asume anyone with a desktop GT will be happy anything less is surely wrong innit? you should be going for very high settings with a full-fat GT, the game will be totally playable

Comment by Gabbawoky at 6:18pm 29th November 2007

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HOW MUCH!!

Unless you're rolling in it, i don't think a gaming laptop is a good idea. We all know you can't upgrade a laptop beyond a point, so all that money for it to be outdated in a year or less when they actualy bring out a card that can play these newer games at full on eye candy? Make mine gold plated with diamond encrusted buttons please........NOT!