Nvidia 8800GT
7. Scalability AA/AF
The Nvidia 8800GT promises high frame rates, even when AA/AF is enabled. How well does this card can perform at 16xQ AA? First, let's see how F.E.A.R. performance is affected after enabling anti-aliasing and Anisotropic filtering.
As expected, the Gainward 8800GTX seems to have the better performance, from 2xAA to 16xAA. However, we see that the XFX 8800GT Alpha Dog Edition is really fast without any AA/AF mode enabled. The Inno3D card, after 2x AA, follows very close behind with a difference of only 1-2 FPS. The Gainward 8800GTS GS 320 falls behind as seen in the graph bellow:
Moving on to the SLI configuration, the performance is almost a flat line up to AF/8xAA for the 8800GT combination. There is no competition for that little beast...
In Prey, we see that the Gainward 8800GTX has a steady drop through the various AA/AF rendering modes. What we noticed is that at 2xAA, both 8800GT cards performed lower than at 4xAA. We can't be sure if that's a driver bug or simply a problem in the benchmark algorithm. In any case, we can see that both 8800GT cards have similar performance.
The same behavior is noticed in SLI mode, where the 8800GT graphics cards performed lower at 2xAA than at 4xAA. The 8800GT SLI combination is faster than a 8800GTS 320 SLI combination.
More demanding games with more details might prove harder to play, if you decide to enable anti aliasing. Company Of Heroes, after 2x AA, stretches system resources enough, even though the game is a RTS, so users might want to avoid enabling AA, unless they're equipped with an Nvidia 8800GT graphics card. The performance until 4x AA was really good with almost 65FPS. In case you enable SLI, the performance, even at 8xQAA mode, is above 40FPS! Very impressive...