Last night after work, I brought my machine in to the shop and they replaced the loaner card they had given me with a brand spanking new BFG 7900 GTX OC. I must say, it’s a beautiful card: factory overclocked; 512Meg of RAM; polished heat pipes; and it’s quieter than my old card.
As usual, the first thing you do when you get a new graphics card is maximize every possible setting in every game you play, and then wonder why it’s not that much faster than the one you had. However, I must say I am very pleased. Here are some examples:
- World of Warcraft
- Everything set to the maximum at 1600×1200 gets you a silky smooth 60FPS+ basically everywhere. Even in Ironforge, outside the auction house, I was getting 58 FPS(!). I would have expected to see higher numbers than this in less graphically intense places, so I need to do a bit more investigation, but I’m not complaining. (Update: I turned on 8xAA/16xAF, and turned off “full screen glow” in game, and it’s still around 60 FPS. Gotta like it.)
- Oblivion
- I cranked up every slider to the max, 1600×1200, with 4xAA instead of HDR. Running around in the forest gets you somewhere around 25..30 FPS, everything else is faster. There’s also much less “chunkiness” as textures get swapped in. It’s very nice. I think I’m going to have to play through from the start again.
- F.E.A.R.
- I re-installed F.E.A.R just to see how well it would run [Bah! Why do companies still release games on CDs?]. Again with everything max’ed at 16×12, it was perfectly smooth almost everywhere, but I did see a few places with a lot of geometry, where the framerate dipped into the 20’s. My guess is that this is still being limited by the CPU. Oh well, next Christmas maybe I’ll get myself one of the new quad Intel’s. (/em winks)
All in all, a very satisfying upgrade. I’ve got a few more games I still want to try on it, but I really have to start practicing seriously for my next concert — it’s only a couple of weeks away — so I don’t really want to go into maximum-gamer-geek mode right now.
The good news is that this platform is a much stronger base for future upgrades than what I had before. There are clear paths for CPU (quad core or D EE), graphics card (SLI) and HD (RAID 0).
Later. (Amso will see you in Azshara)