NVIDIA’s GeForce GF100 Under the Microscope

Performance Preview

Now that we have extensively gone through the architectural aspects and feature set of the GF100, it’s time to see what happens when the rubber hits the road. Up to this point, benchmarks involving NVIDIA’s upcoming cards were impossible to come by which is understandable since any leaks would have opened the competition’s eyes as to what was slowly but steadily approaching them. While the following benchmarks show only a slight glimpse of what the GF100 is capable of, it should be mentioned that all of them were run in front of our eyes in real-time and were done on hardware that is still in its beta stage. These numbers will improve as NVIDIA dials in clock speeds and the beta drivers mature to a point where they are ready for release.


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As you look at the charts below, you will notice that we added in “simulated” HD 5870 1GB results and there is a story behind this. NVIDIA was very forward with us and revealed the specifications of the test system they were running: a stock Intel i7 960, 6GB of 1600Mhz memory and an ASUS Rampage II Extreme motherboard running Windows 7. While we weren’t able to copy the exact same system, we did our best to replicate it by using the exact same CPU and OS while estimating the memory latencies and using a Gigabyte X58-UD5 motherboard. The result? Our stock GTX 285 performed within 2% of the results NVIDIA showed us so we are confident in the accuracy of our results.

Far Cry 2 DX10

While Far Cry 2 was released some time ago, it is still considered an extremely demanding game, especially at the Ultra High DX10 settings NVIDIA was using. They used the Ranch Small built-in timedemo which does tend to give a good approximation of the performance within the game itself. These tests were run on an NVIDIA demo system but the GTX 285 results were backed up by benchmarks we ran on our own test system (see above) and include a standard boot, setup of options and running of Far Cry 2's "Small Ranch" benchmark. AI was enabled as well.


1920 x 1200


The first indications seem to be that NVIDIA is definitely on the right track with the GF100 since it performs far above and beyond the older GTX 285. When you look at it in comparison to the current single GPU champ –the HD 5870 1GB – there just isn’t any competition at all and we are positive that even a highly overclocked HD 5870 won’t come anywhere near the GF100 we were shown.


2560 x 1600


In the past, we found that performance at this resolution in Far Cry 2 DX10 resulted in a fair amount of framebuffer limitation. However, NVIDIA has worked hard to make sure as much of the graphics processing data stays on-die within the cache before finally being handed off to the memory, which will carry huge benefits in games like this one.