Real World Testing
Now that we’ve got the sythetic benchmarks out of the way, it’s time to see how well the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 280 holds up to some real world tests. We have two DX9 titles, a DX9 title that has DX10 abilities, and a pure-bred DX10 title to showcase here. Let’s get it done.
Half LIfe: Episode 2
First up in our collection of 3D shoot’em ups is Episode Two of Half Life 2. This is a replacement to our usual choice of Supreme Commander, due to some issues had with that test. For testing we used the HardwareOC benchmark tool, set to defaults, with the resolution ramped up to 1680×1050. I did a run through both included demos, and turned up some interesting results. This essentially mirrors what we saw in the 3DMark06 tests, as there is little to not difference in performance between each card. There’s even a minor performance drop on the GTX 280 in Demo #2.
With numbers like these being posted, one would tend to assume that playability didn’t suffer in the least. Such an assumption would be correct. Gameplay was extremely smooth. I went in and started ramping up the settings, and when using the GTX 280 I didn’t really see a significant performance drop. The 9800 GTX didn’t fare so well; dropping 25% or better when jacking up detail settings, Antialiasing, and Anisotropic Filtering.
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Things started shaping up a little more when we turned to Call of Duty 4. The game is DX9 based, but has some DX10-like tricks when rendering scenes. Testing was performed doing a run through of one of the early levels and recording frame rates using Fraps. Resolution was set to 1680×1050, settings were ramped up to high, and 4x Antialiasing was employed. In the end, the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 280 posted a decent 28% performance increase over the 9800 GTX.
Once again, playability wasn’t an issue. The ZOTAC card provided smooth firefights in the roughest of missions. Since I was playing the game myself, and not using a benchmarking tool, there wasn’t much more I could do with the settings. Still there wasn’t much I needed to do. ‘Nuff said.
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