7950GTX owners: your experiences with these games?

Hey guys,

I´m getting my new laptop soon with the aforementioned card in it, and I´ve been reading many benchmarks trying to get real-life performances. The problem is that since the card is not that new anymore, all the reviews I´ve found refer to "older" games.

I tried the "desktop trick", as it was discussed here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=120745&highlight=7950gtx

and it greatly helped, but again, I haven´t been able to find as many NEW games as I would´ve liked.


I leave you here the best of those links I´ve found to date:

http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics_2007.html?modelx=33&model1=710&model2=716&chart=318
(Easy found)

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/asus-en7950gt-en7900gs_15.html#sect0
(Loads of games, I love xbitlabs)

http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q4/geforce-8800/index.x?pg=15
(Many cards in it, interesting games)

http://www.3dcenter.de/artikel/geforce_8800_gtx/index10.php
(German only, it´s ok to see performances anyway)

http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=1070&pageID=3219
("classics")

Bare in mind that it might be a slight advantage with the desktop performer (considering also that benchmarks are usually made with top-of-the-line desktop processors), but 3Dmarks06 are really close anyway, if you compare them to some other forum users results.


So, I just wanted to share those links with you guys, and also ask you for your personal in-game experiences with newer games (I found a guy yesterday running Flight Simulator X with a Desktop Quad-Core + two 8800GTX in SLI + updated drivers, getting as low as 16fps! (minimum framerate, naturally. I think I almost cried... )

I also "discovered" recently that the game industry has been hitting hard our machines for the last year or so, and found ArmA and Colin McRae Dirt as two of the toughest guys around (the latter gets ocassionally single digits fps with a 8800 desktop card, according to Gamespot review).

So, I would appreciate your feedback with any "tough dog" you may be playing, and specially with some of the ones I enjoy the most, like Rainbow Six Vegas, GRAW 2 (the first one is included in one of the links I put), Test Drive Unlimited and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (demo??) (which happen to be also quite "famous" due to how badly they perform in many rigs).

If you´re going to put your results up here, please don´t forget to specificy whether or not you have the SLI version., including your game settings for better comparisons.

Quick update: just in case this thread would end up being a long one, I´d recommend using bold letters when you´re posting your results about particular games: it´ll help out people trying particular games as quickly as possible.

Thanks guys, I hope this will be useful for a lot of users (Dell, Clevo, Sager guys... the list is almost endless............)


Just in case you need it, I leave you here some direct links of the available DEMO versions of the aforementioned games. If you have any other demanding game that you want to comment, please feel free to do so:

- Flight Simulator X: http://www.gamershell.com/download_15811.shtml

- ArmA: http://www.gamershell.com/download_18734.shtml

- Colin McRae Dirt: http://www.gamershell.com/download_19282.shtml

- GRAW 2: http://www.gamershell.com/download_19479.shtml

(Please notice that you may have to install additional patches to achieve the best possible performance, EVEN FOR THE DEMO VERSIONS).

If don´t know every single game, so if you do know a QUITE DEMANDING, NEW GAME, that you think should be included in a representative list, please feel free to do so.



EDIT: I just noticed that I should´ve included "NEW games" in the title, to make the post more accurate and easier to find. If any moderator can edit it, I would appreciate it. (Actually, the title is horrible, now that I read it again...)

 

Colin McRae is very demanding lol, I know two people personally whose XBOX 360 melted itself while playing it, I'll see if I buy one of these games and give you some single card vs. SLi results

 

Wow, another XBox horror story... I think I better stick to the good old PC...

Please do not buy any game that you didn´t plan to buy, this was intented to be replied by those who already play any of these games. I have to say that I wasn´t expecting such a "success" with it, though...

Hopefully somebody else will chime in.

Enjoy your gaming!

 

I would also be interested to hear peoples experiences with various games old & new as I am also thinking about getting this card - performances under vista & xp (particulary how MS Flight Sim x performs)

 

If you follow the links I posted, you will find plenty of "old" games in there. Obviously, performance in the vast majority of the oldest ones (more than a year or so) shouldn´t be a problem for this card whatsoever. The tricky question is getting to know how well 1 or 2 of 7950s will be able to handle the newest, most demanding games, if we really want to make our investment "future proof".

About FSX itself, I can almost assure you that, at this and age, it´s going to be quite probably one of the very few games that won´t make the 7950 look as an OK performer.

In any case, I´m sure someone will eventually chime in and give their in-game experiences (perhaps they´re too busy playing...

 

or working

cite: friday

when you said "inversion" did you mean something else?

your 7950gtx should be able to handle any newly released games without difficulty. i KNOW it can do rainbow six vegas and quake wars enemy territory (because i can on my laptop in sig)

 

LOL!! Yes, definitely. Not being a native speaker has these things. It should say "investment".

Thanks for pointing it, I know I´ll remember it next time...

And yes, absolutely reasonable if they´re working, I just wanted to focus in the most positive aspects...

About Vegas and ET, I do agree, but they´re quite probably two of the less demanding games on that list. I´m sure you can´t say same thing about FSX and Dirt, right?

Ideally, people would be posting some fps captures. But hey, you got to be happy with what you´re offered... Probably the weekend will help big time anyway.

Thanks man (and nice laptop you have, by the way. I´m sure it´ll help you stay alive till you hit college...

 

First, I must say that I think this is a great thread. The only game I have from your list is Vegas, and it runs very smoothly.
I run it at 1280*960, no vertical sync, and all of the rest of the settings on/high with the exception of Blur which is at medium settings.

Using Fraps, I had a picture taken automatically every 5 seconds, and the fps ranged from at the lowest 23fps and the highest 51fps, though it was for the most part consistent from 31 to 41. I played the casino level in the terrorist hunt mode. Again, it played out very smoothly.

As for Dirt, I played the demo of it when I had xp on this same pc and it played out very good. I am surprised it has such a reputation, I'll try to get it again and see the actual fps with fraps.

Here are the specs of my laptop:
Clevo 570U
T7200 Core 2 Duo 2.0
512MB nVidia 7950GTX
2gb ram
32-bit Vista Premium
7200rpm 80gb internal HD
7200rpm FD 320gb external HD, ran the game from here
Turtlebeach Audio Advantage Amigo usb soundcard

I should also note that I have a Kingston 2gb usb stick running Vista's ready boost at maximum capacity. I am not sure how much of an impact it has on running the game since I've never turned it off.

Also and more importantly, I am running the gfx card using an unofficial driver as I have yet to find drivers for 32bit Vista from nVidia. Its called "Extreme- GMobileForce Vista Drivers", and is the best drivers for Vista that I have found.

 

Thanks for the kind words, SaifVM. But how come you already have a rep power of 2 with 8 posts only?? I´m already an envious *****... (Oh man, I just been censored. But I can promise you that it only said B I T C H...)

Great to know that you´re not having problems with Vegas.

What you found with Dirt has a pretty easy explanation: you can play the games in two different ways: against the clock or against other opponents. The game performance is reasonable if using the first one, but it drops tremendously when there are other cars onscreen (probably because the graphic card is not capable of getting all them at the same time). And since I always it´s funnier to play against other vehicles...

Thanks for your input. And keep coming back if you have more results...

 

well i can play Dirt at 1280*768 with 2x aa smooth. I have settings at high and options that can be on or off are all off. I get arround 30/35 fps. I didn't noticed framedrops when other cars are onscreen too, but i think it's because my cpu is the bottleneck in stead of the gpu.

 

Here we have proof that this user is ALREADY playing with all options OFF.
You say that you "didn´t noticed framedrops" but you talk about bottleneck, so I assume you wanted to say that you do have framedrops, right?

In this case, though, both your GPU and CPU are slightly less powerful than what we´re seeing these days, but I couldn´t tell you which one bottlenecks. If we have to pay attention to Gamespot guys (who test games with quad cores CPUs and they´re getting framedrops), I guess it´s safe to assume that your main culprit is the GPU. Nothing surprising anyway.

I certainly wouldn´t mind to have your computer in front of my eyes at this very moment...

 

I too asked myself how I could have a higher rep than you when you had more posts than me. The only times I remember posting was when I asked for help asking for a gaming laptop, to which I was overwhelmed by Clevo recommendations, a company I had never heard of, but has become my favorite company by far. And the other time was when I posted the link to the unofficial drivers for the 7950gtx for vista.

Anyways, I've downloaded the demo for DiRT and have took pics of it the same way using fraps. I attempted both the level in Germany were you race against one racer, each starting in a different position; and the other level were you use little dirt bungies, with 10 racers total.

I played at 1024*768, all of the settings were as high as they could go, wether ultra or high with the exception of shadows, which was in high instead of ultra. Vertical sync was off and multisampling was 2x.

For the German track the highest it went was 24fps and the lowest was 16fps, and it mostly stayed in the low 20s.
In the dirt level, though, it did as low as 11 and as high as 20. I have to say though it wasn't choppy at all and I could play it out very well though there was very little and relatively unnoticable slowdowns.

Below I have attached pictures of the German level at the highest and lowest and the more stable. I had to convert the pics from .bmp to .jpeg and lowered the resolution to meet the picture attachments requirements.

 

Here are the pics for the other dirt level.

 

Well i must say i havent tried the game with the options on
The wind effects can be put on possibly, but motion blur... dont think so!

 

Hey Sai-vfm, muchas gracias... ;-) That´s what I call a good effort. I feel like playing that right now...

PC-pulsar, so, what kind of fearless driver you are if you don´t even dare to activate your in-game options... ;-)

 

well to be honest i haven't got time to try the game with those options on, because i can't play the game atm. (i'm having probs with the dvd player)

 

All I can say about DIRT is that it DROP KICKS my 7900 gs. I can only get decent framerates (30+) when playing on medium 800x600 and even then in the buggy circuit when there's many vehicles frames drop pretty badly.

 

That's a console game as far as I know. Yet another crap-coded port from the Xbox.

I wouldn't use it as an indicator of your system's performance.

 

Well, Dirt is a reality. A beatiful looking one. I want to play that reality. And we will have to deal with crap-coded games in the future, as we´ve been doing in the past. I think it´s "fair" to include them in the comparison. I think we have to be mean with our machines to know how much we´ll be able to love them...

 

Dirt is a very demanding game, however with Patch 1.1 it's smoother and a little more optimized. Still kills my XPS M170. Though my desktop rig with a 8800GTX eats it. Can't understand the gamespot guys. I max this game and never gets any framedrops. It's smooth as hell if I could say so on my 8800GTX even with lots of cars on tracks. No difference.