Although EVGA’s e-GeForce 8800 Ultra KO dominates all of the 3DMark tests, look at how close the ASUS EN8800GTS TOP comes in behind it at both resolutions even with the additional hit of antialiasing being enabled—and how it even manages edge by the Ultra in the SM2.0 benchmarks with antialiasing turned off. Pretty amazing when you consider the fact that the Ultra KO is also overclocked out-of-the box. For a card that goes for half the price of an 8800 GTX or Ultra, that ain’t too shabby, folks!

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Infinity Ward is well-known for their award-winning Call of Duty WWII first-person shooters with compelling gameplay, intelligent AI squad mates that fight alongside you and enemies who are equally as skilled in fighting against you. Now they turn their sights on a more contemporary conflict in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

Call of Duty 4 places you in the role of Sgt. “Soap” MacTavish of the elite British commando and counter-terrorist unit the 22nd S.A.S. (Special Air Service) Regiment, and Sgt. Paul Jackson of the U.S. Marine Corps 1st Force Recon Battalion. The game pits you and your squad mates against Middle-East extremists and Russian ultra-nationalists threatening the world with a nuclear holocaust. A compelling, dramatic storyline with more than a few surprising twists and turns, visuals that can give some DirectX 10 titles under Windows Vista a good run for the money and some of the most enveloping and intense combat seen in a first-person shooter, makes Call of Duty 4 one of the best games released in 2007.

I used FRAPS to record a complete run-through of the “War Pig” level in Act I of the game, where Sgt. Jackson and the Marines must escort a repaired M1-Abrams tank to the rendezvous point for a final assault against rouge military commander Khaled Al-Asad who has staged a bloody coupe, thrown the country into chaos and is threatening the region with nukes. The fighting takes place through narrow streets and numerous ambushes, while engaging in brutal and chaotic close-quarters house-to-house combat.

All of the in-game visual settings were maxed out for the tests, and as you can see from the graph and screen shots, not only is the EN8800GTS TOP no slouch when it comes to running Call of Duty 4 at either resolution with all the visuals cranked up; but it comes surprising close to the more expensive, factory-overclocked e-GeForce 8800 Ultra KO in performance while looking good doing so. Oorah! for the ASUS EN8800 GTS TOP!

Crysis

Clearly one of the most highly anticipated first-person shooters ever developed exclusively for the PC, Crysis is a next-generation technological marvel with incredible visuals designed as a showcase for Windows Vista and DirectX 10; real-world environmental and physics effects, and white-hot combat with challenging and resourceful enemies where the player must constantly adapt their weaponry and hi-tech Nanosuit armor to survive.

Not surprisingly, all of that ground-breaking gaming goodness comes with a rather steep price. It’s safe to say that there isn’t a single PC game currently in existence capable of punishing hardware the way Crysis does. Even the mightiest of video cards from NVIDIA and AMD whether solo or paired in SLI or Cross Fire, have their frame rates crushed like a paper cup under the posterior of an elephant when anti-aliasing and all of the game’s visual settings are cranked to the max.

It doesn’t get any better under Windows Vista, either—much to the chagrin of gamers who invested a lot of time and money upgrading their rigs to run the game, and probably Microsoft as well, who desperately need a blockbuster PC title to help drag Vista out of its slump with the majority of gamers who have chosen to stick with the more nimble and mature Windows XP. Future driver updates and patches that implement game optimizations from Crytek will help ease some of the pain of trying to experience Crysis “The Way It’s Meant to Be Played.” It will probably take NVIDIA and AMD’s next generation of GPUs before Crysis can be played with its visual settings maxed out, a decent level of anti-aliasing enabled at resolutions of 1680x1050 or greater and with frame rates closer to the ideal 60 FPS.

I used the three benchmark batch files that the game installs. The only thing I changed under the NVIDIA control panel was setting the Anisotropic Filtering setting in the Crysis profile to 16x. Anti-aliasing settings were enabled and disabled through the game’s menu, and all of the visual detail settings were set to High.

The Crysis v1.1 patch and NVIDIA’s 169.28 ForceWare beta drivers, promised some performance improvements when used together. Although there is some small improvement overall, it’s definitely not enough to prevent the game from playing like the proverbial slide show when 4x antialiasing is enabled. While a GeForce Ultra at 1680x1050 would be considered overkill in any other game, in Crysis it struggles to crack the 30 FPS mark where it is at least tolerably playable. As for the e-GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB, forget it!

On the other hand, even though it’s trailing behind EVGA’s e-GeForce 8800 Ultra KO, the ASUS EN8800GTS TOP is not that far behind, and really hanging in there. I found that whether playing Crysis at 1685x1050 or 1920x1200, the best balance between frame rates and reducing the jaggies, which really ruins the good looks of the game, was with an anti-aliasing setting of 2x.

Here’s hoping NVIDIA and AMD’s next-generation offerings will be out soon…

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Released in March 2006 as the fourth installment of one of the most popular and critically-acclaimed Role-Playing Game franchises of all time, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has won numerous awards and accolades for its unparalleled character creation and development, engrossing and highly addictive gameplay, and stunning visuals. This masterpiece from Bethesda Game Studios features a wondrous, living game world as the backdrop for a classic tale of might, magic, and good-against evil, with the first person perspective added to traditional third person role-playing; a breathtakingly beautiful soundtrack by Jeremy Soule, and voice acting by Hollywood notables Patrick Stewart, Sean Bean, Terrance Stamp and Lynda Carter.

What can you say about a game that has endured for the last three years and continues to be as immensely popular and enjoyable now as it was on the day of its release? Made even more incredible not only by Bethedsa’s own official add-ons, but with thousands of mods to customize almost every aspect of the game as well as provide new quests created by some of the most passionate, inspired and talented modders and enthusiast on the planet? A game that is still no slouch when it comes to pushing the visual envelope at high resolutions with every visual detail setting turned on full-blast—especially when you have mods loaded that effectively doubles the existing visual quality of the game?

I’d say you’d have a game that would do a pretty good job of testing the mettle of any video card—including the ASUS EN8800GTS TOP.

To enable HDR lighting and anti-aliasing for Oblivion, we need to make sure that our desired resolution, and HDR lighting is enabled in Oblivion’s menu, and that anti-aliasing is turned off. Then we push all of the visual effect sliders all the way to the right. I left Self-Shadows disabled because it looks great sometimes and terrible most of the time. Next, we go into the NVIDIA control panel, select Manage 3D Settings, then click the Program Settings Tab; scroll down the list of games in the upper window on the right-hand side of the control panel labeled “1. Select a program to override,” until we find Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. Next, under “2. Specify the settings for Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion” in the lower window, we make the following changes:

For outdoor benchmarking, I had my character ride from Anvil on horseback to Skingrad along the Gold Road non-stop. Indoor benchmarking was recorded inside the Garlas Agea ruins northeast of Anvil, southwest of Kvatch. For the no-antialiasing tests, I simply went back into the Oblivion profile and turned it off.

Once again, for a card retailing for nearly half the price of a GeForce 8800 GTX or Ultra, the ASUS EN8800GTS TOP made quite a respectable showing—no small feat considering all the visual enhancement and other mods I’m running in the game. Meanwhile, the e-GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB can barely keep up when antialiasing is enabled at either of the benchmark resolutions. You’d either have to run without antialiasing (which would really suck); disable HDR and use Bloom lighting and in-game antialiasing (which sucks even more), or run at 2x antialiasing—which really isn’t so bad—to achieve a better balance between visual quality and frame rates Though 2x AA doesn’t look quite as good as 4x AA, it’s certainly better than the other two alternatives.