| XFX GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB XXX Edition Video Card |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Video Cards | ||||||||
| Written by Olin Coles | ||||||||
| Tuesday, 30 January 2007 | ||||||||
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Testing: Heavy BenchmarksDon't let the title fool you, these tests will hardly tax the GeForce 8800 GTS series, but they are what I would consider the most aggressive tests available. The only reason they are labeled heavy is because there is nothing more taxing available to benchmark this product at the time of this writing. We begin our tests with the season's most favored first person shooter: F.E.A.R. 
Despite my obvious lack of mastery when it comes to building charts, I believe you will see the three recorded levels to be easily comparable between the two cards. While there aren't any real differences at the maximum FPS range, the minimum FPS range shows what kind of difference the extra RAM can make. Having twice as much RAM available in the FOXCONN GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB version clearly plays a role in these figures.
As indicated by the benchmarks above, the XFX GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB version is unable to maintain at least 30 frames per second in for the minimum frame rate. Most gamers would consider anything under this average to be unplayable, so this test has shown that there are limitations for the XFX GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB series. At 1600x1200 resolution in what is probably the most demanding test and settings out of the entire battery of benchmarks, both cards did very well. The evidence has shown that video RAM is important, and will make a noticeable impact in the numbers.
While 320MB of video RAM may be more then sufficient to play almost every DirectX 9 game available at the highest settings, once DirectX 10 games meet the market the significance of more video RAM will have a large impact on the maximum frame rate under the harsh conditions created by Shader Model 4.0. 
At the end of all the benchmarks, it was time for me to give the XFX GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB a taste of real world usage. I have been playing Company of Heroes for a few months now with the FOXCONN GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB, and when I switched to XFX's 320MB version I experience no noticeable loss of performance. I think I picture really is worth a thousand words, and this one does the video card real justice.
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