8800 gt - gts comparison.

[Squeetard]

Hi All,
New here just signed up today. I'm from the Okanagan Valley, I write software for sawmills and have been a gamer/pc builder for 20 years now.

I blew my 8800 gts up 2 weeks ago trying to volt mod it. Luckily EVGA gave me warranty. I shipped it off and popped in to Future Shop to pick up something to use until my RMA returned and lo and behold there were about 5 EVGA 8800 GT's on the shelf. Had I known they would be in such short supply I would have grabbed them all. I played with it for a good week, got my new 8800 gts back yesterday and this is what I've found.

I was able to hit a stable clock of 720/1800/1000 on both cards. No more on either. The stock core and mem voltages are the limiting factor here (which was why I was trying to volt mod) I run a swiftech water cooling system and air or water made no difference to the overclock. All my comparisons then are apples to apples, the same core, shader and mem clocks on both cards. The differences being 16 more shader pipelines on the GT and 128mb more ram on the GTS.

8800 gt scored 15167 in 3dmark06
8800 gts scored 14586

That is 4% higher for the GT which has 16% more shaders. The extra memory on the GTS helps make up for this and the GTS gets better when you up the resolution.

I ran the GPU bench in Crysis. I run Crysis at 1920x1200 with a set of tweaks I have been playing with for weeks now and I can best describe them as beyond high with a few cuts in areas that killed the framerate and didn't help the eye candy much, this is a whole other post though, I may do it.

GT 34.65/avg 23.38/min 41.47/max
GTS 33.78/avg 24.49/min 40.62/max

The GT is only 2.5% quicker on average but loses 5% on the minimum. The extra memory on the GTS helps at high resolutions and when the action hits.

The GT is an astounding card for the price. I played CoD4 max detail 1920x1200 with 2x aa and was 60-150 FPS. UT 3 demo is locked at 62 fps and it never dipped below with those settings. The only drawback is the single slot cooling solution. First it blows all the hot air inside your case ambient temps skyrocketed and everything inside got hot. Second, the only way to get past stock clocks is to use a third party program to up the fan speed on this card. They have the fan speed set at 30% by default and this is not good. I can see why they did though as this is by far the loudest fan you have ever heard. Unacceptably loud, like a lear jet landing in your case. Get an aftermarket cooler or put it on water or run at stock speeds, all good solutions though.

My rig:
Swiftech apex ultra plus CPU,GPU and northbridge water cooling.
Q6600@3690
2gb Crucial Ballistx @ 1028mhz 4-4-4-12
6800 GTS @ 720/1000
2-320gb seagate sata2 in raid 0
x-fi gamer
LG 24inch LCD
G15 keyboard and mx1000 mouse.
Klipsch pro media ultra surround.

[Squeetard]

Okay, is this some sort of joke you play on the new guy, haha. What happened to all my punctuation and paragraphs? I pasted this in notepad and it is all there, nicely formatted.

Edit: Fixed the formatting by using explorer instead of Firefox. This looks like vbulletin software and I don't have trouble at others forums.

[Prof. Dr. Silver]

Hey Squeetard,

First of all welcome! Can you tell me what card you got back from EVGA? Preferrably what core version? Maybe you got the SSC version back instead of the old one! Wouldn't that be nice? And 720/1800/1000 is a GREAT OC. Is that on water you said? SWEET!

Ps. That cap in UT3 can be removed. This info comes from Tweakguides.com:
[Engine.GameEngine]

bSmoothFrameRate=True

The game engine is capped to a maximum framerate, as determined by the value of the MaxSmoothedFrameRate variable (see below), which is 62FPS by default. This is done by the developers to prevent FPS spikes and thus provide smoother performance. However, by setting this option to True, you can completely remove this FPS cap. Keep in mind though that if you then find your framerate varying a great deal and causing jerkiness, this option is best set back to False. Uncapping your FPS doesn't increase overall performance as such, i.e. if you got 35 FPS in certain areas with the cap, you'll still do so without the cap.

MinSmoothedFrameRate=22
MaxSmoothedFrameRate=62

These settings control the framerate range between which the game engine attempts to smooth frames. As covered under the bSmoothFrameRate setting above, if that setting is set to True, the framerate limit specified by the value of MaxSmoothedFrameRate will be enforced. Although you can disable this FPS cap, ideally if you want smooth FPS but don't want the default 62FPS cap, one thing you can do is to set the MaxSmoothedFrameRate to a higher value, e.g. 85. It's usually best to set your FPS cap to match your Refresh Rate, since even with VSync disabled, any framerates above your monitor's refresh rate will simply be partial frames anyway. There's no reason why uncapping your FPS will necessarily provide you a better gameplay advantage, and in fact it may do the opposite due to greater FPS variability, so experiment to see if simply using a higher framerate cap is actually a better compromise of smoothness and performance.

Note: When playing online, the engine is capped at 90FPS regardless of these settings.

[Thund3rball]

Originally Posted by Squeetard

... The differences being 16 more shader pipelines on the GT and 128mb more ram on the GTS. ...

I think that's the answer right there. The GT's upped shaders are daBomb compared to the GTS, however at 1920x1200 I think the 512MB of memory is showing it's limits, so the GTS is easily gaining on the GT with it's wider bus and mucho memory.

[Squeetard]

Exactly, and my tests proved that theory. But if I was to buy a new graphics card it would be the GT. But as a GTS owner I don't feel ripped off by the new offering.

Hey Doc, I got back a vanilla GTS, asked them to send me a 112 ssc but no dice. Core is A3 and it clocks better than my old card (680/1000) and the pcb is a revision too as the 2 empty memory spots are in a different location than they were on my first board.

[Squeetard]

Originally Posted by Squeetard

Okay, is this some sort of joke you play on the new guy, haha. What happened to all my punctuation and paragraphs? I pasted this in notepad and it is all there, nicely formatted.

Edit: Fixed the formatting by using explorer instead of Firefox. This looks like vbulletin software and I don't have trouble at others forums.

Edit 2: The formatting glitch was caused by a script blocker add in I had loaded with Firefox, FYI.

[Eldonko]

Great post, exactly what I wanted to know, do shader clocks outweigh the extra mem on the GTS. Thanks for sharing, I like how you tested at the max oc of both too. Welcome to HCF!

[Squeetard]

Hey Thanks,

Not only extra mem but a wider mem bus too on the gts as Thund3rball pointed out. Quite a bit of give and take in choosing, but when you factor in price it's a no brainer, the GT. But I hate the single slot cooling on it. Even at 70% the fan is too loud. Had to max it to hit 720 core and it sounds like a vacuum cleaner, playing Crysis was no fun, the fan drowns out all but your gunshots. There goes the immersion factor. On water my rig is near silent and the jungle sounds, footsteps and rustling leaves are sweet.

Who wants a GT? I live in Vernon, BC. Best way to do this would be to meet me at Future shop, I'll return it and you can snag it open box for $269 less 10%, full warranty.

[3.0charlie]

Originally Posted by Squeetard

Hey Thanks,

Not only extra mem but a wider mem bus too on the gts as Thund3rball pointed out. Quite a bit of give and take in choosing, but when you factor in price it's a no brainer, the GT. But I hate the single slot cooling on it. Even at 70% the fan is too loud. Had to max it to hit 720 core and it sounds like a vacuum cleaner, playing Crysis was no fun, the fan drowns out all but your gunshots. There goes the immersion factor. On water my rig is near silent and the jungle sounds, footsteps and rustling leaves are sweet.

Who wants a GT? I live in Vernon, BC. Best way to do this would be to meet me at Future shop, I'll return it and you can snag it open box for $269 less 10%, full warranty.

Interesting numbers. I have compared the 8800GTS XXX 320Mb model 1 week ago - not even close. 8800GTS XXX 320Mb vs. 8800GT 512Mb both oc'ed

As for the GT cooler, slap on an Accelero S1. Load temps of max. 47C, with noise not even close to a whisper with 2 Yate Loons... that's what I did to mine.

John

[Squeetard]

Looks about right to me. The 320mb is not going to perform like the 640. You have your shader core turned down on the gt clock of 745. I was hitting 2gz on my clock of 720 core.

Here are my 3dmark scores:

GT
Futuremark - ORB - Project Comparison
GTS
Futuremark - ORB - Project Details


BTW, before I run 3dmark06 I go in to the nvidia control panel and turn the image quality setting down to High performance, gets you an easy 500-800 points.