As you can see the X1900XTX and the 7900GTX can play at very nice settings, although the 7900GT's do very respectably.

F.E.A.R. is a little of a slower playing FPS and so even the 18FPS that the Club3d gets minimum is easily good enough to play the game. I am just going to summarise how each card played F.E.A.R. briefly.

XFX 7900GT 256

The XFX card played FEAR very smoothly. The minimum frame rate was very nice and gave a slightly more smooth experience than the Gainward card. This is strange as I would have thought that the extra 256mb would mean that it would run at this high resolution faster than the XFX. Obviously the pure speed of the memory on the XFX is a good advantage on this card.

Gainward 7900GT 512mb

The Gainward again produced a good game playing experience in F.E.A.R. The lowest FPS was 20 which is both perfectly suitable for the game and also looks very nice at this res. An average FPS of 58 is perfectly good for playing this game. I was a bit suprised that the XFX outstripped the Gainward in this test: but this is a trend that I am beginning to see already.

Club3d 7900GTX 512mb

As expected the Club3d 7900GTX played this game at a very high res. The X1900XTX outstripped this card in terms of minimum FPS but suprisingly the nVidia cards average frame rate was quite a bit better giving a better experience overall. The Club3d card is a 7900GTX chip clocked quite a bit higher than the other two card and I think the GT's stood up pretty well in this game.

Once again 1920 x 1200 were managed by the top-end cards and the GT's had to be lowered very slightly. 1680 x 1050 is still an awesome performance for these cards and looks great.

Here's how I felt the cards played.

XFX 7900GT 256

CoD 2 was a title that the XFX card struggled very slighly with it. The game was playable at this level but I felt that the Gainward managed to tackle the task better than the XFX card. Perhaps the extra 256mb of memory helped here, rather than just brutal memory clock speed. Still - playing CoD 2 at this resolution is awesome. 2 x AA on most resolutions looks lovely on this sexy looking game.

Gainward 7900GT 512mb

The Gainward was the fastest of the two 7900GT cards on show in this roundup. The extra memory undoubtedly helped the card render the game at this high resolution with 2 x AA. I did try 1920 x 1200 but this was not playable - though not by much. I felt that the image quality lost by taking AA out of the secenes was not worth it even at the higher resolution. I personally really do not like jaggies.

Club3d 7900GTX 512mb

The Club3d once again played the game at the highest setting out of the three nvidia cards. This was to be expected but I felt that the X1900XTX did provide quite a bit smoother experience than the GTX, even though the game was very playable at this high resolution.

Call of Duty looks spectacular at the resolutions played by these cards and I was very impressed once again by how the cards coped with the game.

I was very happy with all of the nvidia hardware in this game test. I managed to set them all at 1600 x 1200 on Ultra settings with at least 2 x AA.

Here's how they matched up.

XFX 7900GT 256

Quake 4 played at Ultra settings on this card. I was slightly suprised at this as I thought that Ultra settings required more video memory than 256 to play on. The brute force of the XFX card's memory must have helped it in this test. The card managed to run just a small amount faster than the Gainward card in this test which is a testament to its speed. I felt Quake 4 at 2 x AA looked good, but I also got similar looks at High settings with 4 x AA. I chose to include the higher settings in this review for reference sake.

Gainward 7900GT 512mb

The Gainward suffered from slightly slower memory in this test although the playable settings were exactly the same. Once again 4 x AA at high settings looked and played pretty similarly but I included the higher results. I was slightly disappointed with the Gainward card in this game as I would have thought the extra memory would help it out.

Club3d 7900GTX 512mb

The 7900GTX chip once again did very well at this resolution and added 2 x AA to the scene. You do not see much benefit from buying the GTX chip rather than the GT chip in this title, although 4 x AA does look a small amount nicer. The card beats the X1900XTX in that its fastest and slowest FPS is better. Nvidia have had the lead in this game for some time and do not look like giving it up.

If you are a big quake 4/Doom 3 engine game fan then an nvidia 7900 chip is exactly what you are looking for.

I feel that nvidia's performance is not as good as ATI's in this game

XFX 7900GT 256

The XFX card had to have the resolution lowered to 1600 x 900 to run Oblivion. This did still look nice but I felt that this res was a little aliased. The settings in-game for the XFX were slightly higher than the Gainward could handle and the FPS was still above what the Gainward card outputted. Gaming was smooth and enjoyable, if a little jaggy. I used HDR rather than AA in this title as it gives the game a more realistic and immersive feel. I must have missed a screen with this card, but specular dist was very slightly higher than the Gainward card.

Gainward 7900GT 512mb

The Gainward managed to play Oblivion at the same resolution as the XFX card but I had to tune down the settings a little in-game. This was a little disappointing as I like the larger view distance with the XFX card as well as some of the extra details. As before the scenes were a little jaggy but the game was playable at this resolution. The Gainward struggled ever so slightly when you walked outside to a huge scenery, but not enough to spoil the games smooth running.

Club3d 7900GTX 512mb

The 7900GTX managed to play Oblivion at 1680 x 1050. This gave far less jaggies than the GT's but then this card is a GTX chip. The in-game settings were also a bit higher and this again made the game more enjoyable. Playing on the GTX looked very nice, but I was a little disappointed that the nvidia hardware ran the game at lower settings than the ATI hardware. The X1900XTX ran this game pretty much at the same in-game settings as the GTX, but at a higher resolution of 1920 x 1200. This gives a lot less jaggies and is more enjoyable. I did run the "Chuck patch" on the ATI hardware and AA + HDR looked awesome. I had issues with this patch though so I could not include these results in the review.

Once again we see the Gainward trailing behind in this benchmark. The slower memory speed is definately affecting the cards performance in this test. The XFX performed well again with the GTX taking the nvidia's top 3dMark. Here we see the ATI card coming into its own with a higher stock score than the GTX. All nvidia cards performed well in this test and this is an indicator (only) that the cards will be fine with games from that time.

3dMark06

3dMark06 is the latest in the benchmarking tests from Futuremark. It has a lot of DirectX 9.0c features such as HDR and use of Shader model 3.0. This benchmark is very taxing for the cards and also includes quite a harsh CPU benchmark. Seeing as this was run with the exact same CPU this was not an issue.

I have a feeling that the above overclock would have made the Gainward card very fast indeed. Unfortunately running the card at 611/745 could only just not keep up with the XFX at very high memory speeds. As I mentioned above: Gainward are looking into this issue and I will edit this article accordingly if they reply with information.

Club3d

The Club3d overclocked very well, and managed an impressive 710Mhz stable overlcock. The memory also overclocked nicely. This speed means that the Club3d 7900GTX can score quite a bit more than the XTX running at 690/800. I got to 710/865.