 | |||
|
|
|
|
|
 |
GeForce 8800 GTX/GTS Overclocking November 15, 2006 Brandon Sandman Bell |
|
 |
|
| |
Summary: You asked for more GeForce 8800 overclocking results and today, we've got them at higher clock speeds! See how the overclocked GeForce 8800 GTS compares to the stock GeForce 8800 GTX. Is it really able to overtake the more expensive GeForce 8800 card in our full gamut of tests? Let's find out!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 14 ) |
An update
But the number one question we received by far was how we were able to achieve such high scores with the GeForce 8800 GTS. No one expected the overclocked GeForce 8800 GTS to be able to match, and in some cases outperform the GeForce 8800 GTX. After all, the 8800 GTS has a narrower 320-bit memory interface versus the 384-bit memory interface present on the GeForce 8800 GTX, and 32 of its stream processing units as well as one ROP have been disabled from the factory by NVIDIA. Not to mention the lower clock speeds for the graphics core and stream processors.
All this should mean that even a highly overclocked GeForce 8800 GTS shouldn’t be able to catch up to, much less outperform a stock GeForce 8800 GTX right?
Based on our testing last week, it looked like this wasn’t always the case. But we’ve since gone back and re-run our overclocked benchmarks and couldn’t replicate the astounding numbers we were seeing previously, even though we were using a different GTS card that was overclocking to even higher clock speeds!
Quite frankly, we’re still surprised by this, as we repeat our performance runs three times and take the average score for all of our official results. Under our latest round of overclocked testing, even the highest of those three runs didn’t equal the average we recorded previously in some games! Again, we’re still at a loss to explain the disparity, but we wanted to pass this info along as we know that many of you are currently debating between the two GPUs and want as much info as possible on this topic.
Fortunately, the news isn’t all bad for the GeForce 8800 GTS, even under our latest round of testing there are cases where it comes close to matching the GTX in performance, but often this occurs in cases where the graphics card is CPU-bound, such as in the case with Pacific Fighters and LOMAC, or in Quake 4 at 1280x1024. Remember that at lower resolutions with a card as powerful as the GeForce 8800, you’re often CPU-bound, particularly with titles that aren’t shader-intensive. We also still believe that with further driver updates, NVIDIA’s driver team will likely be able to wring more performance out of GeForce 8800.
[image]
| <% print_image("01"); %> | <% print_image("02"); %> |
Overclocking the GeForce 8800s
As we’ve mentioned before, in order to overclock the GeForce 8800 cards, you’ll have to download NVIDIA’s nTune utility. The Coolbits registry hack doesn’t work and only prompts you to download nTune. In particular, you’ll need nTune 5.05 or better to overclock the GeForce 8800.
This isn’t a big deal if you already own an nForce motherboard, as nTune provides built-in overclocking options and BIOS settings for your motherboard all from within Windows, but for those of you who have already upgraded to P965 or 975X Core 2 motherboards this may be a bit of a disappointment as nTune is a 30MB+ app. In fact, it seems that as a result, some GeForce 8800 owners have turned to ATI Tool instead to overclock their graphics card.
NVIDIA plans to enhance nTune to make it more appealing for GeForce 8800 overclocking in the near future though. One feature that’s been mentioned is the ability to independently set the clocks for the graphics core and stream processors. Right now in nTune when you overclock the graphics core, you also overclock the stream processors by a fixed percentage.
We’d also like to see NVIDIA integrate GPU temperature monitoring on the same page as GPU clock speeds, as it has been done with Coolbits in the past. Currently the two are located in two totally different parts of nTune.
| Test Systems | Page:: ( 2 / 14 ) |
System Setup
Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800
EVGA nForce 680i Motherboard
ASUS P5W DH Deluxe
2GB Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C4
ATI Radeon X1950 XTX
Catalyst 6.10
EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTX ACS3
Leadtek GeForce 8800 GTS
Driver version ForceWare 96.45
NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX
NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2
Driver version ForceWare 93.71
250GB Maxtor Hard Drive Maxline III SATA Hard Drive w/16MB Cache
Windows XP Professional SP2
DirectX 9.0c
Benchmarks
Half-Life 2 Lost Coast
Far Cry 1.33 (1.4 patch for ATI cards)
F.E.A.R. 1.07
Quake 4 1.2
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Battlefield 2 1.3
Lock On: Modern Air Combat
Call of Duty 2 1.3
Dark Messiah of Might and Magic
| 3DMark 06 | Page:: ( 3 / 14 ) |
3DMark 06 – Direct3D
| HDR: HL2 Lost Coast | Page:: ( 4 / 14 ) |
Half-Life 2: Lost Coast – Direct3D
| Dark Messiah of Might and Magic | Page:: ( 5 / 14 ) |
Dark Messiah of Might and Magic – Direct3D
| Quake 4 | Page:: ( 6 / 14 ) |
Quake 4 – OpenGL
| LOMAC | Page:: ( 7 / 14 ) |
Lock On: Modern Air Combat – Direct3D
| Pacific Fighters | Page:: ( 8 / 14 ) |
Pacific Fighters – OpenGL
| F.E.A.R. Performance | Page:: ( 9 / 14 ) |
F.E.A.R. – Direct3D
| Oblivion HDR+AA | Page:: ( 10 / 14 ) |
Oblivion – Direct3D
| Call of Duty 2 | Page:: ( 11 / 14 ) |
Call of Duty 2 – Direct3D
| Far Cry HDR | Page:: ( 12 / 14 ) |
Far Cry – Direct3D
| Company of Heroes | Page:: ( 13 / 14 ) |
Company of Heroes – Direct3D
| Conclusion | Page:: ( 14 / 14 ) |
The memory seems to overclock nicely as well, although we saw a lower OC by percentage for the GTX’s memory of just 6%. However, many end users seem to be hitting 1GHz or more with their GTX boards (although this is by no means a given).
Keep in mind that all these results are obtained with stock GeForce hardware. We’ve made no modifications to the card’s cooling, nor have we changed the card’s fan speeds to run at higher RPMs. This is all bone stock with no tweaks.
Thanks to the new clocks, the GeForce 8800 GTX’s performance in Call of Duty 2 and F.E.A.R. improved by 10% at 1600x1200, and 12-14% in Oblivion at the same resolution with HDR and AA. Company of Heroes also saw a performance improvement of 14% at 1600x1200 with the GeForce 8800 GTX.
The GeForce 8800 GTS saw slightly higher performance gains on percentage thanks to its new clocks, F.E.A.R. performance at 1600x1200 for instance went up from 59 fps to 72 fps, an improvement of 18%. It wasn’t enough to catch up to the GeForce 8800 GTX however.
Those of you who were following the OC’ed GTS versus stock GeForce 8800 GTX benches no doubt noticed that the OC’ed GTS was able to catch up, and slightly overtake the GTX in some of our tests with Company of Heroes. Considering the margin of error in this benchmark (about 3-5%) we’re going to call it dead even between the two in this game. We’re also going to work on creating a better replay to test CoH performance in the future as the variability from run-to-run is a little higher than we’d like.
The overclocked GeForce 8800 GTS also put up a strong showing in Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, where performance improved by 20% at 1600x1200. Again, it wasn’t enough to catch up to the stock GeForce 8800 GTX, but it’s still a substantial performance improvement nevertheless. The overall tally for the overclocked GeForce 8800 GTS at 1600x1200 in comparison to the stock GeForce 8800 GTX was:
1% behind in Company of Heroes (this could increase with further driver optimizations)
8% behind in Quake 4
13% behind in F.E.A.R.
7% behind in HL2 Lost Coast
7% behind in Call of Duty 2
Pacific Fighters: CPU-bound case
4% behind in LOMAC
17% behind in Dark Messiah of Might and Magic
16% behind in Far Cry HDR+AA
9% behind in Oblivion Mountains area with HDR+AA
11% behind in Oblivion Foliage area with HDR+AA
We hope these overclocked scores for the GeForce 8800 GTX and 8800 GTS should help those of you who were on the fence concerning the GeForce 8800 GTS/GTX debate decide which card is right for you. As you can see, NVIDIA’s made sure that there’s a fairly extensive performance difference between the two cards, and while that can be diminished a little on the GTS with overclocking, the GTX core appears to have enough headroom in it that it can be overclocked to make up for this difference. Both cards are after all based on the same G80 graphics core.
Based on all this, if you can afford to spend the extra $250 or so on the GeForce 8800 GTX, then you should do it if you crave the most performance. The GTS can almost catch up to the GTX in some cases (and even surpass it in CoH under the right conditions), but overall the GTX leads even the overclocked GTS by a nice margin in shader-heavy titles (we think GeForce 8800 GTX performance in CoH could very well be held back at this point by drivers, keep in mind that by the time this game was released NVIDIA’s driver team would have had very little time to optimize for it. Dark Messiah was technically released later than CoH but it’s based on the much more mature Source engine from Valve). That should be enough to ensure that for the enthusiast who craves the very best, a GeForce 8800 GTX card should be on your wish list this holidays.