Specifications
In this table you will find a summary of specifications of all the different cards in this test:
You may have noticed that despite its name, a GeForce 7800 GS is actually (except in memory bandwidth) inferior to a GeForce 7600 GT.
Windows Vista
We tested how each card functions with the Aero interface of Windows Vista. There were no problems except for the fact that Nvidia didn’t update the drivers for the GeForce FX.
The tests
For this test there were five games: Quake 4, Half-Life 2, Rainbow Six Vegas, Oblivion and Need for Speed Carbon. Given that these are former and recent mid-level cards, we opted for resolutions of 1024x768 and 1280x1024 and anisotropic 4x filtering (except for Quake 4, which automatically activates 8x). We also tested performances in video decoding. The CPU, an Athlon 64 3700+, is a good platform for AGP. It isn’t an extreme CPU, which isn’t representative of an AGP system to be updated.
Test configuration:
Athlon 64 3700+
MSI K8N Neo2
2x 512 MB DDR
Windows XP SP2
ForceWare 93.71
Catalyst 7.2
