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eVGA GeForce 7300 GS |
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A Big Step Up... for Some |
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by Josh Walrath |
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Fable This X-Box port is a very nice DX9 application which has some really advanced shaders included. Shadow rendering is also very important to this title, and it makes extensive use of it throughout. Shadow rendering used to be an issue on ATI cards, but the latest Catalyst driver fixes it. FRAPS was used to capture the average FPS with a manual run through the first village of the game. 4X AF and no AA were also enabled.
The 7300 GS simply throttles the X1300 in this application. There are probably several reasons for this, but the primary one is that the base engine was designed for the X-Box, which is in turn based on NVIDIA’s GeForce technology. NVIDIA’s Ultrashadow also plays a part here. Still, at High Quality settings with max shadows, neither card provided smooth gameplay. Morrowind This older DX8 title still looks very good, even when compared to the very latest RPG’s out there. It also helps to show how well these cards handle older applications. FRAPS was used to gather the average framerate of a manual run through Balmora. High Quality settings were enabled with 4X AF and no AA.
For one reason or another NVIDIA’s performance with Morrowind has always been behind ATI’s. Still, both products provide smooth gameplay up to 1280 x 960, but once 1600 x 1200 is reached then ATI has a clear advantage and it simply runs smoother on the X1300 than it does on the 7300 GS. It is good though that both products can run this application well at 1600 x 1200. Battlefield 2 The latest iteration of the Battlefield series features a very complex DX9 based engine with plenty of shader effects. A manual run through of Mashtuur City was captured with FRAPS. High Quality settings were enabled with 4X AF and no AA.
The 7300 GS holds a significant lead throughout the resolutions, but once the fighting started neither could handle more than 800 x 600 comfortably. Guild Wars While not as big as Everquest 2 or WoW, Guild Wars has a very popular following and features a rendering engine that is quite breathtaking considering it uses DX8 technology. Because it relies on DX8 shaders it is not nearly as computationally challenging as other engines. High quality settings were enabled with 4X AF and no AA. FRAPS was used to record a manual runthrough of Ascalon City.
While the X1300 is faster at 1024 x 768, it drops behind the 7300 GS at the higher resolutions. Both cards ran this program very well at 1024 x 768, but the 7300 GS was just slightly smoother in gameplay at 1280 x 960. 1600 x 1200 was too much for both cards. F.E.A.R. If there was a poster child for requiring a high end graphics card, this is it. F.E.A.R. brings even the mightiest to their knees, and it is often too much for lower end cards. The in-game time demo was used to benchmark these cards. Max image quality was enabled with 4X AF and no AA. Soft Shadows were disabled.
The 7300 GS falls well short of the performance of the X1300 in this application. It simply was not playable on the 7300 GS with the max quality settings enabled even at 800 x 600. The X1300 does fare better here, but its performance still is well short of playable.
We see that both cards drop down quite low during playback, making the game stutter and nearly pause at times. If a consumer wants to play F.E.A.R., they really need to invest in a much beefier video card. Anti-Aliasing Performance Using Half Life 2 and a custom demo, I looked to see how both cards handled anti-aliasing. High quality settings were enabled along with 4X AF at 1024 x 768 resolution.
While the 7300 GS is faster with no AA enabled, it does take a much larger hit than the X1300 when higher levels are used. Once 4X AA is enabled, we really see a big difference between the two. This could well be because the X1300 has double the ROPS to handle the multi-sampling. Interestingly enough the X1300 at 6X AA is still faster than the 7300 GS at 4X AA. Anisotropic Filtering Performance Neither card had a significant performance drop by enabling AF. Going from no AF to 16X AF resulted in around a 5% decrease in most applications tested.
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Copyright 1999-2006 PenStar Systems, LLC. |
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