NVIDIA GTX 280 Performance Revealed – MSI N280GTX

 

Call of Duty 4 is a stunning DirectX 9.0c based game that really looks awesome and has a very full feature set. With lots of advanced lighting, smoke and water effects, the game has excellent explosions along with fast gameplay. Using the in-built Call Of Duty features, a 10-minute long gameplay demo was recorded and replayed on each of the GPU’s using the /timedemo command a total of 5 times. The highest and lowest FPS results were then removed, with an average being calculated from the remaining 3 results.

 

 

 

Beaten only by the 9800GX2, the GTX 280 really shows strength at both low and high resolutions. Once again, comparing the card to its predecessor, the 9800GTX, is like comparing night and day with a ~40FPS lead for the card at 1280×1024 and almost 30FPS lead at 1900×1200. Even ATI’s current (but not for long) flagship, the 3870×2 is made a mockery of.

 

Moving on to the CPF scale, the GTX 280 is clearly the most costly of the bunch based on the £420 est. launch price, but as we said earlier, this price WILL come down, so it will certainly be interesting to see where it sits in a few months time.

 

 

 

BioShock is a recent FPS shooter by 2K games. Based on the UT3 engine, it has a large amount of advanced DirectX techniques including excellent water rendering and superb lighting and smoke techniques. All results were recorded using F.R.A.P.S with a total of 5 identical runs through the same area of the game. The highest and lowest results were then removed, with an average being calculated from the remaining 3 results.

 

 

 

Once again, the star of the show is still the 9800GX2, with the GTX 280 sitting 10-20FPS lower depending on the resolution. The 9800GTX puts up a good effort at 1280×1024, but with the resolution increased to 1900×1200, it’s left at the bottom of the pack. Neither the 3850×2 or 3870×2 manage to produce any noteworthy results against the competition.