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8800GTX/E6600/NFS Carbon Gaming Performance. |
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Written by Treez
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Dec 04, 2006 at 05:05 PM |
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How much of an impact CPU speed has on this game?
I decided to do some testing today to find out how much of a bottleneck CPU speed is to the 8800GTX. I choose a silver sprint race in the challenge series using the Porsche Cayman, and used FRAPS to record frame rates. I benchmarked from starting position all the way to the finish line for this test.
I ran the game at my native monitor resolution of 1680x1050 widescreen with 4XAA/16X Anisotrophic filtering vsync set to off, using the 97.02 drivers from Nvidia. I enjoy gaming with every single eye candy option to the max, as I am sure most hardcore gamers would do it. And with the nvidia's new 8800GTx I can do it flawlessly with out having to worry about SLI, which I am not a big fan of.
Alot of folks would expect frame rates to be higher, but apparently that may not happen until we use DirectX 10 or, a new improved nVidia driver gets released. Even though frame rates were not that high the game was silky smooth, and ran without a hitch or stutter.
The only overclocking that took place was with the E6600 which I ran at stock (2.4GHz) all the way up to 3.51GHz for these tests. Ram was run at stock PC6400 (400MHz) all the way up to PC7100 DDR2 476MHz. 8800GTX was ran at stock clocks for all tests with quality settings.
The results were;
#1
CPU@ 2.40GHz(stock)
memory@2:3
400MHz 4-3-3-10 timings
2006-12-03 11:03:09 - speed2
Frames: 10405 - Time: 178353ms - Avg: 58.339 - Min: 40 - Max: 73
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#2
CPU@ 3.43GHz
memory@ 1:1
381MHz 4-3-3-10 timings
2006-12-02 19:24:06 - carbon
Frames: 10438 - Time: 179037ms - Avg: 58.300 - Min: 46 - Max: 73
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#3
CPU@ 3.43GHz
memory@ 4:5
476.8MHz 5-5-5-15 timings
2006-12-02 19:08:10 - carbon
Frames: 10972 - Time: 188108ms - Avg: 58.328 - Min: 46 - Max: 73
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#4
CPU@ 3.52GHz
memory@ 1:1
391MHz 4-3-3-10 timings
2006-12-02 19:40:01 - carbon
Frames: 10314 - Time: 176770ms - Avg: 58.347 - Min: 46 - Max: 73
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#5
RUN with 8X Antialsing / 16X Anisotrophic Filtering
CPU@ 3.52GHz
memory@ 1:1
391MHz 4-3-3-10 timings
2006-12-04 08:20:56 -carbon
Frames: 9149 - Time: 171289ms - Avg: 53.412 - Min: 42 - Max: 66
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We can clearly see that in the first test with E6600 @ stock 2.4GHz that we got the lowest minimum frame rate of 40fps with an overall average of 58.339fps and a max of 73fps.
Overclocking the E6600 up to 3.43GHz, a 1GHz overclock increased the minimum frame rate of 40 to 46fps, yet still we still maintained an average of 58.300fps with the same max of 73fps.
Even increasing memory bandwidth to 476MHz with the same clocks in test 3 did not help to increase max FPS or minimum FPS. Still maintaining an average of 58.323fps.
In the final test ran at 3.51GHz again, processor speed did not help to improve anything in performance with the same minimum, average and maximum as with the previous overclocks of 3.43GHz.
Based on this data and the results we can clearly see, that while gaming with the 8800GTx, overclocking your processor will raise your minimum frame rates, but will have no impact on your maximum frame rates and/or overall average frame rate while gaming at maximum resolution/eye candy.
As far as need for speed carbon goes, cpu speed / memory bandwidth does not significantly impact or should I say does not impact gaming in a negative way. So a person with an E6600@ stock will have very similar gaming experience compared to a setup with E6600 @ 3.51Ghz once using 8800GTx @ max settings.
Here are a couple of In-Game Screenshots using 8xAA/16x Anisotrophic filtering @1680x1050 resolution.
Besides like other members myself included, we already know that once eye candy and screen resolution is up to the max, we can see that the cpu does nothing much to help average frame rates.
So have fun gamers, just remember for the millionth time, if you are a hardcore gamer, get the 8800GTx/8800GTs now and enjoy games like never before.
Forget wasting money on an entire new rig, and spend your hard earned dough on the best graphics card your money can buy.
I hope this is informative, I plan to do some more testing with some other games to see how true this holds for games of today, and if we will see significant changes in different gaming engines.
Apparently in NFS Carbon cpu/ memory bandwith does not impact performance much besides lowest frame rate by approx 5-6fps. But overall performance will remain the same.
Thanks for your time people, and I hope this was helpful.
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