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Tuesday, June 30, 2009

post://4306510762466182006/

I received my EVGA 295 GTX Co-Op today and here are the results!

17:45 - Card installed, powered on
18:00 - Drivers Updated, restarted
21:06 - done with benchmarking

Initial observations:
Compared to the 280 GTX:
- same length
- feels heavier
- a tad thinner

Hardware installation included 2 devices (GTX 295)
I left a 280 in there for strictly PhysX for now but going to do try benchmarks both with and without it on both cards.

Test: -/+ for decreased / increased performance

3DMark Vantage (Ambient Occlusion: ON | PhysX: ON): +
Score: 16209
CPU: 33477
Graphics: 13831

3DMark 2006 (Ambient Occlusion: ON | PhysX: ON): =
Score: 13260
SM 2.0: 4953
SM 3.0: 6965
CPU: 3268

3DMark Vantage (Ambient Occlusion: OFF | PhysX: OFF): +
Score: 12415
CPU: 8610
Graphics: 14560

3DMark 2006 (Ambient Occlusion: OFF | PhysX: OFF): -
Score: 13126
SM 2.0: 4830
SM 3.0: 6935
CPU: 3263

GTA IV: -
Benchark @ 1920 x 1200
Texture Quality High
Texture Filter Quality: Very High
View Distance: 25
Detail Distance: 30

Previous (2 x 280 GTX):
Average FPS: 52.01
Duration: 37.55 Sec
CPU Usage: 77%
System Memory Usage: 36%
Video Memory usage 92%

Current (1 x 295 GTX Co-Op):
Average FPS: 48.96
Duration: 37.72 sec
CPU Usage: 78%
System Memory Usage: 38%
Video Memory Usage: 99%

Crysis: -
I was a custom mix of Very High and High with a lower view distance with the previous cards but durring hectic battles I'd notice everything getting really choppy.

With the new card autodetect chose all High
1920 x 1200 was too much for it at first, but after it settled in and had the textures loaded it went relatively smooth and playable. I turned down to 1280 x 800, the next lowest 16:10 resolution in the list but the quality wasn't worth it. The text was way too blocky, and the trees all had squares where light shone in-between the leaves. I turned it up to 2560 x 1600 and it looked really good but and still had similar performance as the other resolutions. Overall I'd say this is an improvement as I can eek up the shaders and the physics with little to no impact in framerate... too bad said framerate is a steady 30 fps or so. I have the latest version and drivers but I remember a past bug in Crysis where it would run worse if you changed the resolution in game so I'll try this one again tomorrow.

NFS Undercover: +
I had it at 1920 x 1200 previously - with medium world effects (I hate the motion blur) all detail set to highest and 6x AA. I had turned off VSynch previously because it was pulling it down to 30 when I was probably getting about 40 or so, but I HAD to enable it with the new card. I was getting at least 60fps easy and even when I turned it up to 2560 x 1600 I had to turn on VSynch to make it not look like everything was in Fast Forward.

Benchmarks really don't gain much over my 2 x 280s and even go down in the game test. That's partly because the new card actually reduces my available video RAM. The RAM is what I had originally targeted as my bottleneck for draw distance in GTA and this isn't going to help at all, I even need to bring it down a little.

I'm not super impressed, especially since I could get the same performance and even better high resolution performance from my 2 (and now much cheaper) 280s. All in all I'm sure if you're running lower resolution you could kick some ass running 2 of these, but good luck with that.

Rendering is faster due to the increased clocks and there is a noticebly higher quality to the image but as far as sheer frame rates go - this card isn't going to cut it for anyone running higher then 1920 x 1200.

My recommendation is that if you're looking for high performance AND high resolution - stick with the 295 GTX 1g+ cards. I'll be waiting for the higher memory cards to come out, and praying my 90 days for the step up program is enough time.

Labels: 2009, 3dmark, consumerism, games, games for windows, hardware, materialism, video