Testing The NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GPUs

Testbed

The Graphics Cards

Testing Methodology

Time was short so we chose four FPS (First Person Shooter) games for benchmarking :

• Far Cry
• Half Life 2
• F.E.A.R.
• Doom 3

Unfortunately, no other type of genres were available with reliable built-in benchmarking tools. Third-party programs like Fraps were used as needed.

Doom 3 is still one of the most graphics-intensive game in the market today, and easily stresses the graphics card to the limit. That makes it very suitable for testing graphics cards. We used the standard 'demo1' run for benchmarking with an average of 3 runs using Ultra Quality settings. Anisotropy Filtering and Anti Aliasing were enabled through Display Control Panel.

HardwareOC's Far Cry benchmarking tool was used for testing Far Cry averaging 3 runs running 'PC Games Hardware Demo'. Anisotropy Filtering, and Anti Aliasing are enabled through benchmark utility.

In Half Life 2, HardwareOC's Half Life 2 benchmarking tool was chosen for the tests, using the HOC - Anticitizen map. Anisotropy Filtering, and Anti Aliasing were enabled through benchmark utility.

Lastly, F.E.A.R. used its own built-in benchmarking tool for testing. Anisotropy Filtering, and Anti Aliasing were enabled from within the game itself.

All games were tested at 1600x1200 with maximum details. All optimizations were disabled from the Display Control Panel, and Image Quality was set to High Quality. All games were tested with Anisotropy Filtering 16X enabled.

Game Settings