GTX285 vs GTX260+ vs 4850 Performance Test

Direct3D (8xS)

Now it’s time for some benchmarks using full scene super sampling, and I’ll start with nVidia’s 8xS combined AA mode. We say goodbye to the Radeon for now, but it’ll be back for the OpenGL tests.

Since some titles from the previous page have good performance even with 8xMSAA, they might be fast enough with 8xS depending on your tastes, so I’ve retested all of them. I’ve also enabled nVidia’s transparency anti-aliasing as indicated (MS = multisampling, SS = super-sampling).

It’s fascinating to observe that thus-far the average performance advantage of the 285 over the 260+ has been below 24%, but it’s 26.76% in these tests. This is the point I made earlier when I stated modern cards shine with these AA modes. Super-sampling strains everything on the GPU – memory, shaders and fillrate – so it ekes out everything the GPU has to offer.

Far Cry and Pacific Assault simply fly on the 285 at 8xS, even when using TrAA with copious amounts of vegetation content, and image quality is impeccable.

And look at the original Fear: it gains almost 30% extra performance and averages 62 FPS at 1920×1440 with 8xS and 16xAF. That kind of performance on a single GPU could only be dreamed of two years ago. I still remember my 7900 GTX and 8800 GTS (640 MB) absolutely crawling when shadows were set to high, at far lower resolutions and AA levels, no less. I cannot wait to replay this game on the 285.