GeForce 8800M GTX – first benchmarks

Posted at: 4:50am 29th November 2007 by Clive Webster

We put Nvidia’s first mobile DirectX 10 GPU through its paces to see how it copes with the latest games

Although Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 chips have been doing the rounds for over a year now, the first laptop-friendly versions have only just started to trickle out. Unsurprisingly, their specs aren’t quite up there with their desktop counterparts, with a lower count of stream processors, but Nvidia assured us that they would provide ‘near-desktop performance.’ To find out if this is true, Rock kindly loaned us a laptop featuring the new GeForce 8800M GTX for benchmarking

First off was Crysis, which, to be fair, even top-end desktop graphics chips struggle with when you get into to the top settings. At 1,024 x 768 with no AA and AF and Very High settings, the GPU benchmark returned a minimum frame rate of 11fps minimum, and a 19fps average. Dropping the detail settings to High boosted the minimum frame rate to a still unplayable 20fps, but amazingly we saw a minimum frame rate of 30fps when we dropped the detail settings to Medium. These are the same settings that you’d expect a GeForce 8800 GT to cope with at a playable frame rate, so it’s impressive stuff.

Most gaming laptops we’ve seen struggle to play games at full detail settings at 1,024 x 768 anyway, and that includes less power-hungry games such as Need for Speed: Carbon. However, on the GeForce 8800M GTX we saw an average frame rate of 55fps in this game. A few fitters caused the minimum frame rate to drop to just 5fps, but we put this down to the BETA BIOS and pre-release ForceWare drivers, as the game was generally very smooth. Unfortunately, though, the early nature of the hardware and drivers meant that F.E.A.R. didn’t run reliably, while S.T.A.L.K.E.R. greyed out some of its advanced graphic options, making the test invalid.

However, we did manage to benchmark World in Conflict, which proved a struggle for the 8800M GTX. We initially tested the game at 1,280 x 1,024 with no AA or AF, but got a minimum of 12fps and an average of 27fps in DirectX 10 mode, and only a minimum of 11fps and an average of 35fps when we switched to DirectX 9 mode. Dropping the resolution to 1,024 x 768 failed to make the game playable in either mode too.

Comparatively, the GeForce Go 7950 GTX in the Elite-listed Rock Xtreme 770 only manages a 10fps minimum and 25fps average in the same DirectX 9 test. While the lower minimum could be blamed on the slower 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 of the Elite-list system (the 8800M GTX system has a much faster 2.6GHz Intel Core 2 DuoT7800), the higher average is the work of the GeForce 8800M GTX.

While the resolutions we tested at might seem comparatively low, the GeForce 8800M GTX is easily the most powerful mobile graphics chip on the market. That’s due to its large bank of 96 stream processors running at 1.25GHz and the core clock speed of 500MHz. The mobile GPU also has 512MB of memory running at 800MHz (1.6GHz effective) though it only has a 256-bit memory bus. Nvidia claims the chip has a TDP of only 30W, which is much lower than that of the GeForce Go 7900 GTX, so the new chip could also appear in laptops that don’t weigh the same as a small elephant.