nVidia 8800 Ultra Bottleneck Investigation

Methods

I picked a selection of modern games and all tests were run at 1600×1200, with two sets of tests per game.

One set was run with AA and AF both disabled (the game’s “raw” state), while the other set was run with 16xAF, 4xAA and TrMS (usually but with some exceptions, like Crysis which doesn’t support TrAA for example).

The stock column displays the average framerate with the card being run at stock clocks (core 612, shader 1512, memory 1080) while the core, shader and mem columns show the framerate and % drop after a 19% underclock is applied to that clock only. When one is underclocked the rest are at stock speed.

The underclock frequencies and colors are as follows: core 492, shader 1224, memory 872, each a drop of 19% as noted above.