FEAR is
Sierra's latest first person shooter which relies heavily on DirectX 9 features.
With its "Soft Shadows" feature enabled, even the fastest videocards run at a
crawl, FEAR is definitely the new benchmark for future FPS games to
follow.
FEAR framerates are very, although I'm not
sure if you'd want to enable AA/AF when playing this game. FEAR is still pretty
hard on even the most high end videocard GPU.
|
experts tip: quick trick to improve
image quality |
|
while most nvidia videocard users are happy with
the default image quality of the forceware drivers, it is possible to turn
up the eye candy even more... first load up the display properties and
click the 'Advanced' button, that will open up a new window. From there
select the videocard driver tab and select the 'Performance & Quality
Settings' option. At the bottom of the window on the right are the 'Image'
settings, change its value to 'High Quality' and press the OK button
twice. Now the image quality within the drivers has been set to 'HQ' which
should improve the look of games without sacrificing performance
by much if anything. |
| Comments and Feedback? Suggest a
Tweak. |
Value and speed, an all
around capable choice
There is no such thing as the perfect videocard GPU, but
nVIDIA has definitely made a strong case for the GeForce 7900GT. It's not the fastest videocard core on the market but it's
definitely near the top. Factor in an aggressive price point
and manufacturers bundling in loads of goodies and you've got yourself a
pretty great deal on hand.
Bottom of the barrel GeForce 7900GT's go for $330 CDN,
but for just a little more you can get yourself a PCI Express videocard like the
Asus
EN7900GT TOP/2DHT/256M/A. With a retail price of $353 CDN ($320 US, £173 GBP), the Asus
EN7900GT TOP is faster than the average 7900GT thanks to factory
pre-overclocking.
The Asus EN7900GT TOP/2DHT/256M/A PCI Express videocard
comes with a lot of goodies, the biggest being a full copy of the
game King Kong. The videocard itself looks like a plain jane GeForce 7900GT
aside from the custom Asus cooler. GeForce 7900GT videocards are a bit smaller
than other high end cards, which is nice for a change.
Despite the 90nm
GPU die shrink videocards like the Asus EN7900GT TOP/2DHT/256M/A use up more
power than the previous generation, so make sure your power supply is
sufficient. If you're sure about yours, you can check with nVIDIA's SLI recommended power supply's list.
The performance of the Asus EN7900GT TOP/2DHT/256M/A is
simply awesome and offers value that hasn't been seen for a while. Whether it be
FarCry, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory or FEAR, the Asus EN7900GT kicks butt.
It outperforms the older Geforce 7800GTX/GT and sometimes by quite a margin too.
As for the ATi side, it can only be bested by ATi's latest and greatest the
Radeon X1900 XTX.
As mentioned earlier, the PCI Express Asus EN7900GT
TOP/2DHT/256M/A videocard comes factory overclocked with core speeds running at
520 MHz, memory 1.44 GHz. That's a very healthy increase from stock 7900GT
speeds of 400 MHz core, 1.3 GHz memory wouldn't you say? In PCSTATS'
overclocking tests we were able to push the videocard to 561 MHz core, 1.51
GHz memory. At this speed the EN7900GT TOP was approaching GeForce 7900GTX performance territory! Nice.
The Asus EN7900GT TOP/2DHT/256M/A is an awesome
videocard and if you're looking for serious frame rates in any game, definitely
check it out. One thing is for sure, this bad boy is fast enough for anything in
the foreseeable future.
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Review
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