Frequency Scaling – Shooters

Notes

Before we examine the GeForce 7800 GTX’s performance with specific processors from AMD’s lineup, let’s first take a look at how well the 7800 GTX card scales at various clock speeds. This will give us a basic idea of what clock frequencies the 7800 GTX begins to respond to.

In order to test this, we took our FX-57 chip and use its unlocked multiplier to play with a range of clock speeds. In this case, we’ve decided to start at 1.8GHz, and work our way up to 2.8GHz.




Performance in the beta build of F.E.A.R. improves by 2% when going from 1.8GHz to 2.0GHz, and 7% in Half-Life 2. The margins improve once we hit 2.2GHz, with the 2.2GHz/7800 GTX combination outrunning the 2.0GHz system by 8% in Half-Life 2 and 3% in F.E.A.R. beta. From there, the performance improvements continue as we hit higher clock speeds in both applications, although the margins aren’t quite as high, with each 200MHz improvement buying us roughly another 4-5% in Half-Life 2 performance, and at most, 3% in F.E.A.R. beta.