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2560x1600 Gaming Performance with Dell's 3007WFP Part 1 March 10, 2006 Brandon Sandman Bell |
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Summary: With its jaw-dropping 2560x1600 native res, Dell's 3007WFP is capable of dishing out some very impressive visuals provided you have the graphics card to handle it. And just which cards would that be? In Part 1 of today's article, we attempt to find out, running NVIDIA's latest GeForce 7900 cards against ATI's Radeon X1900/X1800 lines in single-card and dual-GPU configurations. Is SLI a requirement to game at 2560x1600? Who comes out on top? Find out inside!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 7 ) |
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One new feature both NVIDIA and ATI are touting in their latest high-end GPUs is the ability to game at extremely high resolutions with good frame rates. NVIDIA likes to call it “extreme high definition”. 1080p, the holy grail of high definition, represents a 1920x1080 screen resolution. That’s over two million pixels (2.1 megapixels to be precise) or twice the resolution of 720p (1280x720) displays.
We’ve been benchmarking the latest high-end graphics cards at the even more demanding resolution of 2048x1536 for about a year now. At 2048x1536 you’re looking at 3.1 megapixels of gaming goodness -- when running through de-dust in Counter-Strike Source on your 21” monitor at 2048x1536 you can practically sit and count every spec of sand on the ground instead of hunting down terrorists or CTs; it’s an incredible experience. But as awesome as that sounds, 2048x1536 is no longer the holy grail of gaming…2560x1600 is.
2560x1600 provides two times the resolution of 1080p, coming in at 4.1 megapixels. Running at a res this high on a 30” screen is simply awesome, but as you can imagine, not just any GPU can run at 2560x1600 and still dish out good frame rates. Therefore, we wanted to see what the latest cards from ATI and NVIDIA were truly capable of at the 3007WFP's native res of 2560x1600.
We should note that the following benches are early, we’ve barely had the monitor for 48 hours and in case you didn’t notice yesterday, there were some fairly major GPU launches on the 9th, so we haven’t had enough time to really push our testbeds thoroughly. What we thought we’d do is share some early benchmarks with you today, and then listen to your feedback on what you’d like to see us do next. At 2560x1600 jaggies aren’t quite as big of an issue so we elected to test without AA for today’s article, but perhaps for Part 2 you’d like to see 2xAA benches? What about 1280x800 for lesser GPUs? Are there any particular screenshots or images you’d like to see so you can compare what 2560x1600 looks like in comparison to your 1600x1200 or 1680x1050 display? These are the types of things we’d love to hear feedback on, so feel free to drop your thoughts in the news comments for this article.
| Test Systems | Page:: ( 2 / 7 ) |
System Setup
AMD Athlon 64 FX-57
ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe (CrossFire Xpress 3200)
MSI K8N Diamond (nForce4 SLI X16)
2GB OCZ DDR400 SDRAM
ATI Radeon X1900 XTX
ATI Radeon X1900 CrossFire (to simulate performance of X1900 XT)
ATI Radeon X1800 XT 512MB
Catalyst 6.3
NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX
NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT 256MB
Driver version ForceWare 84.17
250GB Maxtor Hard Drive Maxline III SATA Hard Drive w/16MB Cache
Windows XP Professional SP1
DirectX 9.0c
Benchmarks
Pacific Fighters 4.04 (with Perfect landscape setting for ATI and NVIDIA)
Call of Duty 2 1.01
Half-Life 2 Lost Coast
Lock On: Modern Air Combat 1.02
F.E.A.R. 1.03
Quake 4 1.04
| Single-card Gaming 2560 Performance | Page:: ( 3 / 7 ) |
Quake 4
F.E.A.R.
Half-Life 2: Lost Coast HDR
Pacific Fighters
Call of Duty 2
| Dual-GPU: Shooters at 2560x160 | Page:: ( 4 / 7 ) |
Quake 4
Call of Duty 2
Half-Life 2: Lost Coast HDR
| Dual-GPU F.E.A.R. 2560x1600 | Page:: ( 5 / 7 ) |
F.E.A.R.
| F.E.A.R. Performance 2560x1600 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 7900 GTX | 18 | 63 |
| GeForce 7900 GTX SLI | 41 | 171 |
| GeForce 7900 GT | 13 | 44 |
| GeForce 7900 GT SLI | 24 | 151 |
| Radeon X1900 XTX | 21 | 83 |
| Radeon X1900 XTX CrossFire | 30 | 180 |
| Radeon X1900 XT | 22 | 79 |
| Radeon X1800 XT | 14 | 43 |
| Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire | 21 | 80 |
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| Dual-GPU Pacific Fighters | Page:: ( 6 / 7 ) |
Pacific Fighters
| Pacific Fighters 2560x1600 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 7900 GTX | 30 | 229 |
| GeForce 7900 GTX SLI | 30 | 324 |
| GeForce 7900 GT | 28 | 172 |
| GeForce 7900 GT SLI | 30 | 314 |
| Radeon X1900 XTX | 26 | 153 |
| Radeon X1900 XTX CrossFire | 25 | 234 |
| Radeon X1900 XT | 26 | 145 |
| Radeon X1800 XT | 26 | 138 |
| Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire | 24 | 215 |
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| Conclusion | Page:: ( 7 / 7 ) |
For instance, NVIDIA clearly dominates in Quake 4 and Pacific Fighters. We should note that we’re testing Pacific Fighters with the latest patch, which adds vertex texture fetch to improve performance and water image quality for NVIDIA’s shader model 3.0 cards. A fallback method is used to produce somewhat similar results for ATI’s X1800/X1900 cards but the water quality doesn’t look quite as good. In any case, NVIDIA’s latest GeForce cards hold pretty comfortable leads over ATI’s cards with both these games at 2560x1600, whether you’re running SLI or CrossFire (as you can see ATI’s latest Catalyst driver doesn’t provide CrossFire performance improvements in Pacific Fighters).
In Half-Life 2 Lost Coast with HDR, we’re calling it a draw in single-card configuration. Both cards are so closely matched at 2560x1600 that you’ll hardly see any performance difference whether you’re running hardware from ATI or NVIDIA. Once two cards are used however NVIDIA’s SLI GeForce 7900 GTX was able to pull a little further from two X1900 XTX cards running in CrossFire mode, while the 7900 GT SLI system outperformed the X1800 CrossFire setup we tested.
The results turned in ATI’s favor though once we booted up F.E.A.R. and Call of Duty 2. We’re still using the same intensive demo for CoD 2 that we’ve been using since we first started testing with this game. Our demo comes from the multiplayer map Villers-Bocage, France and it’s pretty intensive, with 26 players on the server and lots of smoke, a grenade even goes off at one point. Needless to say it’s a pretty worse-case scenario that’s designed to stress the cards as much as possible. We’re debating about going back and creating a less intensive demo from the single-player campaign, what do you think? In any case in CoD 2, the X1900 and X1800 cards all come in ahead of NVIDIA’s 7900s at 2560x1600 although honestly the frame rates of all the single-card configurations are lower than we’d like. In dual-card testing ATI takes the crown too.
Performance in F.E.A.R. is a little closer, in fact two GeForce 7900 GTX cards running in SLI outperform two Radeon X1900 XTX CrossFire cards. The 7900 GTs outran the X1800 XT CrossFire configuration too. When only one card is being tested though the ATI cards manage to come out ahead in F.E.A.R. at 2560x1600.
We’ve still only barely scratched the surface of what these cards are capable of, we’re looking to expand into more games as well as include more cards. And of course, as we said earlier, please feel free to drop any additional feedback you have in the news comments for this article!