XFX 9800 GTX Black Edition 512mb

Call of Duty 4

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 and is fast and furious, perfect for our test suite.

 

 

The first of our real life benchmarks shows the 9800 GTX Black Edition give a small boost in numbers when playing games at 1920 x 1200, although not a noticeable difference in gameplay.

 

F.E.A.R.

F.E.A.R. is a game based on the Lithtech Jupiter EX engine. It has volumetric lighting, soft shadows, parallax mapping and particle effects. F.E.A.R. is a little older game so the 9800 GTX should handle this well and look fantastic.

 

 

F.E.A.R. showed a huge improvement in FPS with the 9800 GTX. I’m not quite sure exactly why the difference was so marked but after several re-tests I confimed that the numbers are correct.

 

Bioshock

Bioshock is a game based on the Unreal Engine 3. It uses some DirectX10 features such as awesome water and smoke effects. The detail level in the game, combined with a frantic pace makes for an excellent benchmark. I’ve found Bioshock behaves strangely sometimes in benchmarks so it will be interesting to see how it does here.

 

 

Bioshock didn’t prove a massive boost in minimum or average FPS over the stock 9800 GTX, but the average FPS was a nice increase; although again I don’t think gameplay was different.