EVGA 8800GTX – A Gaming Analysis on FEAR and CPU Scaling

Follow-up to see if there is a CPU bottleneck on the 8800 GPU’s – Dominick V. Strippoli

I decided to perform another series of tests on the new EVGA 8800GTX to really try and get in depth and pinpoint any/if any CPU bottleneck on these 8800 GPU’s. The results are interesting to say the least.

System Specs:

• E6700 Conroe “Week 27”
• Asus P5B-Deluxe Wifi (vcore mod)
• OCZ Titanium Alpha VX2 Ram
• Vapochill LS “Jin Mod” Cooling

I chose to use the in-game FEAR benchmarking utility measuring for average FPS from various CPU clockspeeds. I also categorized an Overclocked GPU as well as a Stock GPU chart to make deciphering any bottlenecks even easier. All tests were performed on maximum/ultra quality and every single piece of eye candy enabled. The resolution is the standard benchmarking/gaming res of 1024 x 768 – 32 bit color.

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And here are the charts to complement the benchmarking results:

After sitting here and looking over these results for the past 40 minutes, it seems to me that once the CPU clock gets up to around 3.40 GHz, the GPU completely hits a wall and stops scaling with CPU clockspeed at this resolution.

It definitely picks up a few frames per second, from 2.66 GHz 3.40 GHz every 100 MHz, but once you approach 3.40 GHz, FEAR gaming will not scale AT ALL with CPU clockspeed. Again, this is all done at 1024 x 768 resolution. If I turn up the resolution to 1280 x 960, things get very interesting. When high res gaming, it is quite obvious here that the GPU’s performance does not scale AT ALL at any CPU clockspeed:

And here are the high resolution charts:

As you can see, at a standard resolution of 1024 x 768 and maximum/ultra settings, an 8800 GPU definitely scales a tiny bit with CPU clockspeed up to about 3.40 GHz on an Intel Core 2 Duo processor.

However, under high resolution gaming (for example: max/ultra quality and 1280 x 960), the 8800 GPU absolutely does not scale with CPU power AT ALL. I’m talking zilch, nada, nothing.

Thanks for reading!

Dominick V. Strippoli Owner, Administrator, SVTsnake.com