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eVGA GeForce 7600 GS |
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Two Birds, one Thrown Video Card |
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by Josh Walrath |
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Fable: The Lost Chapters This fun little X-Box ported to PC title does pack some nice effects into a beautiful graphics package. A manual runthrough of the beginning village with FRAPS was done with the highest quality features enabled. 4X AA and 8X AF are enabled for all tests.
The game becomes pretty choppy at 1600 x 1200 with the 7600 GS, but it didn’t exactly feel smooth on the 7600 GT at that same resolution either. In pure numbers there is a pretty hefty gap between the GT and the GS, but when considering the price of the 7600 GS and that it doesn’t run particularly hot or loud, the tradeoff in performance is pretty acceptable. Morrowind This was the best looking title of 2002, and I was quite curious how these cards handled these older applications. Morrowind is more CPU bound than anything, but once high resolutions and AA/AF are used, then we start to see a difference between the cards. Playing Morrowind at 2048 x 1536 with 4X AA and 8X AF is truly a wonderful experience. View distance was set to maximum with all quality options set to High, though shadows are turned off. A manual walkthrough of Balmora was done with FRAPS.
Running at 60 fps at 1600 x 1200 with 4X AA/8X AF is quite an accomplishment for a budget card. The difference between the two cards at 2048 x 1536 is pretty phenomenal. I think a large part of this is the much faster memory on the GT giving almost double the bandwidth over the GS. Battlefield 2 The sequel to the best selling Battlefield 1942 series is a graphically advanced shooter with some really nice effects. The maps are filled with a lot of detail, and it can be a pretty rough app for a lot of cards out there. I set all quality bars to High and utilized 4X AA and 8X AF. A run-through of Mashtuur City was done using FRAPS to get an average.
The 7600 GS does give a pretty good experience at 1024 x 768 with 4X AA, but things are pretty unplayable at 1600 x 1200 with the same quality levels. It does play it nicely at 1600 x 1200 with AA disabled though. I think again the lack of memory bandwidth hurts this card as compared to its faster brother, but for around $110 it can certainly give a good experience in this trying application. Far Cry (HDR) Far Cry is getting a bit old these days, but it is still a very stunning title. Now that HDR effects have been added, another dimension to this game can be visually achieved. I set all quality sliders to High/Ultra quality and enabled 8X AF. Anti-aliasing with NVIDIA cards in floating point HDR is not supported. The Regulator demo was used with HDR set to 7.
The 7600 GS performs fairly well in this benchmark, and it seems as though the G7x series of cards performs HDR faster than the previous NV4x series. Playing at 1024 x 768 with HDR allows for a smooth experience with both cards, but jumping up to 1600 x 1200 makes things pretty choppy, especially with the GS. F.E.A.R. Other than Oblivion, F.E.A.R. is still one of the most graphically intensive games out there, and it can push even high end hardware to its limit. Everything was set to High Quality, with soft shadows disabled. 2X AA and 8X AF were also enabled and the in-game performance test was used. I recorded the average and the minimum FPS in this test.
Smooth gameplay was only achieved at 1024 x 768. Anything above that and the framerate would drop into the teens in scenes with a lot of action going on. The 7600 GS was able to play well with 2X AA at 1024 x 768, but that was the limit of it. Considering that the GeForce 6600 DDR-2 could only get 33 fps with no AA, I would say that the 7600 GS has a big step up on its sibling.
Even at 1024 x 768, the 7600 GS gets pretty close to the 20 fps mark. Disabling AA would make this far more playable.
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Copyright 1999-2006 PenStar Systems, LLC. |
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