GeForce 7950 GX2 vs 2x 8800GT in SLI?

[shockwolf]

Hi

I’m considering upgrading my graphics card. I currently have a Geforce 7950 GX2 and I am thinking about replacing it with 2x 8800GT’s in SLI but I’m not sure what the difference in performance will be. By Googling and searching this forum I have not been able to find any direct comparisons to tell whether the upgrade move will be worth it or not.

I’m also wondering whether to wait for the 9800GT’s but I’ve read rumours that they will be re-boxed 8800GT technology with the ability to SLI with 3 instead of 2.

I was wondering if anyone around here might know more and have any advice please?

 

[lopes1211]

Looks like tom's hardware says 34.2 benchmark for the 7950gx2 and a 47.1 for 8800GT OC in SLI so maybe a 38% framerate improvement in a game.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/graphics-cards/warhammer-mark-of-chaos-v1-6,581.html

-CL

 

[shockwolf]

That’s a damn good find lopes1211! Thanks. My main concern is ES IV: Oblivion, since it’s my favourite game. I want to play it the second time around with a much better frame rate than last time. By the looks of the Oblivion comparison on that site there is an incredible difference between my card and 2x 8800GT’s!

Oblivion: The Elder Scrolls 4 (Outdoor)
Fraps/THG-Savegame (v1.1) (1280x1024x32, no AA, 8x AF, max Quality, HDR-R)

8800 GT OC SLI = 80.7fps
7950 GX2 = 22.40fps

I think I’ll be investing in 2x 8800GT’s then. Still wondering about the release of the 9800GT’s and whether to wait though. If the rumours are true then I’ll be giving them a miss.

Cheers for that!

 

[Nelviticus]

Tom's Hardware did another very good article just recently: [url

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-gpu-upgrade,1928.html

] GPU vs. CPU Upgrade: Extensive Tests[/url]. It's mainly about whether it's better to upgrade your CPU or your graphics card, but you'll still find it interesting reading as two of the cards in their test are the 7950 (although not GX2) and 8800GT (although not in SLI).

Regards

Nelviticus

 

[wahnula]

I would always choose the newer part...if for no other reason than DX10 support. Personally, I would upgrade to the 9800 GX2 now...you know it's going to be the gold standard for quite a while...and can be run in SLI for (4) GPUs.

Tony

Users helping Users...

 

[shockwolf]

That is interesting Nelviticus. Appears that it depends very much on the game as to what card will perform better. Quite bizarre that the 7950 GT outperforms the 8800 GT’s on Crysis! Yet with other games like COD 4 the 8800 GT floors the 7950 GT and there’s barely a comparison.

Thanks Tony, I’m not really interested in DX 10 and Vista anyway so I think the 2x 8800 GT’s are probably best for me and considerably cheaper than those 9800 GX2’s. I could buy three 8800GT’s for the price of one those 9800GX2’s and yet they only perform about as well as 2x 8800GT’s. I think I paid too much for my 7950 GX2 at the time to be honest and I think the 9800 GX2’s are just a following trend of those. I can’t believe you can still buy a brand new 7950 GX2 for the same price I paid nearly 2 years ago! It’s madness!

 

[Nelviticus]

I thought the same thing when I first read the article - however if you read the intro it says that they ran some of the tests for the older cards (the 7- and 6-series) at lower settings. So the 7950 does beat the 8800 on Crysis but only when playing at a lower resolution. That kind of makes sense, I suppose, but it would also have made sense to run identical tests for all the cards.

Note: this only applies to the 'GPU or CPU' article I linked to. In the comparison charts linked to by lopes, all the cards are tested at the same settings.

Regards

Nelviticus

 

[kjv1611]

Unless something's changed in the past month, I highly doubt that the 9 series is worth paying for over the 8 series. Probably best to get anything in the 8 series for now, and then whatever replaces the 9 series whenever/whatever that is. I know initial reviews of the 9 series cards showed that there was little improvement in some tests, and that they actually performed worse in others. Seems at least one was on Tom's Hardware, but I didn't pay a whole lot of attention.

I've got an 8600GT, and it does just fine and dandy on what games I have played. But, I am trying to stay away from PC Games at least for a while. Some of those things can really eat up the clock!

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[shockwolf]

Cheers for all of your input guys.

However I went ahead with the upgrade and bought 2 x BFG Geforce 8800GTs OC and have realised to my horror that there is virtually no difference in performance to my old 7950 GX2!!!

Well my old score on 3d Mark 06 was 7573 and I ran it today and got a score of 9326. So there is a definite improvement there but not by much I’d say. The 2 main games I play at the moment (or plan to play) are Oblivion and NWN2. I used fraps to test out the before and afters and I have found that there was very little difference at all between the old card and both of the new ones put together. In fact if I disable the SLI and only run one card it performs a little worse than the old card!

So it’s hardly the same jump in performance as seen on Tom’s Hardware, which was this again:

Oblivion: The Elder Scrolls 4 (Outdoor)
Fraps/THG-Savegame (v1.1) (1280x1024x32, no AA, 8x AF, max Quality, HDR-R)

8800 GT OC SLI = 80.7fps
7950 GX2 = 22.40fps

They were tested on the same system too. However they were of course tested on a very different system to mine. Like I say I with the 8800 GT OC SLI I’m getting virtually no better boost in performance over the 7950 GX2! Something must be wrong here?

I’ve tried Nvidia drivers 169.21 and 175.16 and used driver sweeper to clean up before installing again. Could it be that my motherboard, CPU and ram is simply too old to be running the 8 series Geforce cards?


My System:

A-BIT KN8 SLI Motherboard
Onboard Realtek AC97 Audio
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ Skt939 2.4GHz 1MB Processor
Zalman Super Aero Flower CPU Cooler
Corsair 3GB, DDR400 / PC3200, non-ECC, 184 DIMM, unbuffered, CL3, 64Mx8
Western Digital SATA 250GB HD Model WDC WD2500JS-00MVB1
DVD LiteOn DH-16D2P-02C
LG GSA-4167BAL 16x DVD±RW Dual Layer Internal IDE
2 x BFG 8800GT OC 512MB GDDR3 in SLI
Logitech Mx 518 Gaming-Grade Optical Mouse
Nostromo n50 Controller
Hi-Power Black 900W Modular 13.5cm Fan PSU
OS: Windows XP Professional with SP2

 

[Nelviticus]

Just a couple of days ago the magazine Custom PC landed through my letterbox and they had a massive labs test of all the current cards in multi-card mode (SLI or CrossFire) versus single card. They were full of praise for the 8800GT but said it gained virtually nothing from SLI (unlike the 9600GT, which scales very well).

However ... it should still out-perform your 7950 by a considerable margin. Your system is beefy enough for the CPU not to be a bottleneck.

Did you try turning on things like anti-aliasing? That's the kind of thing which will kill a 7950's performance at high resolutions but which the newer-gen cards can handle much better.

Regards

Nelviticus

 

[shockwolf]

Yeah I’ve messed about with all kinds of graphic settings. I’ve tried switching the AA on and off and it seems to make very little difference to the 8800GT’s. The only thing that makes any difference in NWN2 is the shadows. Reducing the shadow quality can boost performance like nothing else but that’s always been the case even with the old card.

However with Oblivion it doesn’t seem to matter what I do. I can turn the shadows off completely, turn AA on or off and reduce or increase the resolution and yet the frame rates remain near enough the same with the 8800GT’s, which is really weird. Outdoors is where the game drags down the most and the fps seems to range around the low 20 to low 50’s depending on where I’m stood. Combat throws the fps right into the teens! I’m pretty sure even my old 7950GX2 could do better than that when I tweaked other settings and reduced the shadows. It’s very strange.

Also a friend of mine has only one 8800GT, it is not over clocked and we have done a comparison using Oblivion. We each took 2 screenshots using fraps in the same 2 places. We used the same settings and his version even had wide screen where as mine does not.

My result: Place 1 = 43fps, Place 2 = 52fps
My friends result: Place 1 = 67fps, Place 2 = 86fps

Another thing is that his system is another Intel Core Duo system as is the one in the test on Tom’s Hardware. This is why I’m beginning to think that maybe my AMD system is pulling the cards down.

I’ve emailed BFG’s tech support anyway to see what they say.

 

[Nelviticus]

Have Task Manager running while you're playing the game (right-click the task bar and select 'Task Manager'). Choose the 'Performance' tab, play your Oblivion test scene for a while, then quickly alt-tab to Task Manager. If the 'CPU Usage History' graph is virtually maxed out for the whole time you were playing, you'll know that your CPU was at 100% load in which case it's where the bottleneck lies.

However, I can't believe that a dual-core Athlon X2 4800+ is struggling with Oblivion as it was one of the fastest CPUs around when the game came out. You could try physically taking one of the gfx cards out of your system and running the benchmark again. If you get poor results, swap to the other card and try again. It's possible that one of them is faulty and is dragging your performance down.

I'm interested, as I play Oblivion and NWN2 and am considering upgrading my 7900GT to an 8800GT.

Regards

Nelviticus

 

[shockwolf]

Nelviticus, thanks for the Task manager idea! Didn’t think of that one. The results of the CPU usage history say that Oblivion is not using 100%. I’d say it manages about 75% at the most but mostly I think it sat under 50%. I agree it wouldn’t be right considering the age of the game to be draining an Athlon X2 4800+.

But what I am beginning to believe despite all this is that an Intel Core duo may be able to squeeze a lot more out of the Geforce 8 series than an Athlon can no matter what the game.

I have also taken the cards out and tested them individually. They appear to pull more or less the same results. I am currently using Nvidia driver 175.16. Standing in the same place and looking into 2 different directions outside of the Imperial City (across the water not too far from the sewer exit at the start of the game). I look at the imperial city and then look the opposite direction east towards Cheydinhal taking screenies with fraps.

Card 1
Looking West at Imperial City = 47fps
Looking East = 68fps

Card 2
Looking West at Imperial City = 46fps
Looking East = 64fps

Both in SLI
Looking West at Imperial City = 49fps
Looking East = 66fps

Another thing about these cards is they are of a different age. They sent me one that was made in January and the other in March. Both have a very different a layout, fans are in a different place, circuit boards are different colour and one has a black protective casing like the new 9 series. But I don’t suppose that could make a difference with the SLI? I mean at the end of the day they are still the same model and manufacturer.

Nice to meet another NWN2 and Oblivion player btw! You have good taste in games.

 

[Nelviticus]

I just re-read the article I mentioned. Oblivion was one of the games they tested (with the 169.25 drivers for the 8-series cards) and they found that two 8800GT cards in SLI mode were actually slower than a single one. At 1680 x 1050 they got 70fps average (50 minimum) with a single card and 67fps average (48 minimum) with two, with all settings at maximum and during a combat.

All that proves is that you should be getting higher frame rates than you are, which isn't much help. Their test system was a crazily-powerful quad-core set-up, but even though your CPU is nowhere near as powerful it shouldn't be slowing to a crawl during battles.

Your RAM could be faster but that only has a tiny impact on frame rate. Your CPU could be more powerful but it's not being pushed to the limit as it is. You've tried several different driver versions. I'm not sure what else to suggest I'm afraid!

Nelviticus

 

[kmcferrin]

A couple of thoughts here...

One, your 3DMark scores went up by about 23%. That's no slouch there.

Two, while the video card is the most important factor in frame rates, the CPU still plays a role. Especially when you're dealing with extremely fast video cards or SLI. The CPU and memory need to be able to pump data to the cards as fast as possible, and at some point you're going to hit a wall. Your video cards are probably much faster than your CPU/memory system, which is why you're not getting the results that you want.

Rather than cranking up the video card capabilities as much as possible, you're better off trying to make the system a little better rounded.

________________________________________
CompTIA A+, Network+, Server+, Security+
MCSE:Security 2003
MCITP:Enterprise Administrator

 

[shockwolf]

My thoughts exactly, kmcferrin. Sadly I may need to upgrade the rest.
Gone are the days when a Graphics card upgrade can drastically improve performance. These days I think it’s better just to simply buy a whole new PC.

Nelviticus, my advice is not to risk it. ;-)

 

[shockwolf]

Ok I bought:

Asus P5N32-E SLI Socket 775 Nforce 680i SLI FSB1333 Audio Firewire ATX Motherboard
Kingston 2GB Kit (2x1GB) DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 Memory Non-ecc CL5 Unbuffered 1.8V
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Socket 775 (3.0GHz) 1333FSB 6MB L2 Cache Processor

Oblivion maxed out with 8x AA on and in 1600x1200 res

Facing West toward Imperial City = 64fps
Facing East = 83fps

3D Mark score = 12405

Conclusion: Yep, that’s the stuff!