GTX470 Performance Test Part 1: Windows XP
Hardware
- Intel Core i5 750 (2.8 GHz, 21x multiplier, Turbo Boost on).
- 4 GB DDR3-1333 RAM (2×2 GB, dual-channel).
- Gigabyte GA-P55-UD3 (Intel P55 chipset, F6 BIOS).
- nVidia GeForce GTX285 (1 GB, reference clocks).
- nVidia GeForce GTX470 (1.28 GB, reference clocks)
- Creative X-Fi XtremeMusic.
- 30” HP LP3065.
Software
- Windows XP 32 bit SP3
- nVidia driver 197.13 & 197.41, high quality filtering, all optimizations off, LOD clamp enabled.
- DirectX February 2010.
- All games patched to their latest versions.
Settings
- 16xAF forced in the driver, vsync forced off in the driver.
- AA forced either through the driver or enabled in-game, whichever works better.
- Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games.
- All results show an average framerate.
Surely this is a driver issue. As gamers we want to play our old games as well as our new one’s.
Part of the fun of upgrading is that we get to see an FPS boost in our old games.
Tesselation is all well and good, but no-body is using it yet and I hope there is a higher take up of DX11 than there was of DX10.
Gearing a card for the future is all well and good but predicting the future isn’t exactly an exact science!
I agree completely. Fortunately I’ve seen this issue many times before, and the good news is that driver improvements can fix things.
The GTX285 has “gold standard” driver performance, so it’s tough for any new release driver to compete with it initially.
What will be really interesting is how Windows 7 compares.
To the above – but the GTX470 performs well on Windows 7. It seems that nVidia have rightfully given up on xp.
We’ll see about that, Bakes.
Windows 7 might not change things at all because I don’t benchmark like the standard fare. I use far more games, along with unorthodox gaming settings compared to regular reviews.
As always, outstanding job BFG10K.
Any “early leaks” from the Win7 results? 😉
Yeah, so far Windows 7 is behaving differently in some of the games.
It seems that many of the older games are so dependent on the TMU muscle for performance.
After looking at the “Part 2” Win7 comparison, I see that Prey, Doom 3, and Far Cry 2 perform so much better but UT2004, one of my favorites, performs considerably worse (maybe after Nvidia fixed it thanks to you pointing out the stuttering issue on Vista a while ago, so it’s still a driver problem?). Overall, Win7 is much better though (except for a few unrelated sound issues).
thanks, great article!
The Unreal 2 engine stuttering was only present on XP, and was later fixed. I don’t think the low UT2004 performance is related in any way, but rather the problem is specific to the GF100, on both OSes.