Gaming at 3.6Ghz

With the release of every new product it is always interesting to see how it will scale with the release of new hardware. Currently the fastest CPU's available are Intel's Core 2 CPU's and specifically the 2.93Ghz X6800 and 2.66Ghz QX6700 .... it is likely that in the lifetime of the 8800 series Intel will release new CPU's which are clock speed increases on the existing architecture. With this in mind we hooked our QX6700 up to a Vapochill cooler and raised the core speed and memory speed to 3.6Ghz and DDR2-1000+

The following results should therefore give a good indication of how the 8800GTX will benefit from future hardware releases.

Don't have flash installed? then click here for a jpeg

 

Don't have flash installed? then click here for a jpeg

 

The first thing that jumps out of the graphs is that there is actually very little change in performance when running FEAR:EP at 1920x1200 with 4xAA and 16xAF when moving from 2.66GHz to 3.6GHz and this means that at these settings our section of game play is limited by the GPU.

The Oblivion test shows a little more variation in performance though with the minimum FPS figure increasing the most. Overall though the 1GHz overclock has a minor impact on performance in our test scenarios.

All is not lost though in terms of future performance scalability though. Currently the driver engineers at Nvidia are no doubt familiarising themselves with the hardware architecture and will in time find numerous ways to squeeze extra performance out of the hardware at the same clocks and as a result scalability will be increased. For an example of a similar happening we can think back to the large performance increases ATI were able to achieve as the driver engineers learned to use the X1K memory controller more efficiently after that products release.