The percentages tell a better story of the performance the BFG 7900GT OC exhibited with FEAR. Never once did the frame rate drop below 25 FPS at the previous settings and only a minuscule 4% of the time was the frame rate between 25 and 40 FPS, while a full 96% of the time the frame rate was greater than 40 FPS. Gamers like to see all the eye candy and at the settings with the first round of FEAR testing, you don't get to see all the beautiful effects FEAR has to offer, though it did look great.
To really tax the BFG 7900GT OC I maxed out all the settings in FEAR including the AA, AF and turned on soft shadows. FEAR warns that the settings I chose would severely degrade performance, and it was right. Maxed out the minimum frame rate was a miserly 17 FPS, the average frame rate was 33 FPS and the maximum frame rate was 78 FPS. Again the percentages give a better idea of the BFG 7900GT OC's performance. 24% of the time the frame rate was below 25 FPS, 56% of the time the frame rate was 25 to 40 FPS and only 20% of the time was the frame rate greater than 40 FPS. The only time I really noticed a significat slow down of the game was in the scenes with the water and fire. The water definately slowed the system down the most.
The next and final benchmark I ran was with the very popular Quake 4. Quake 4 is still one of the best looking games around and one of the few that allows the graphics card to hit my Eizo's native resolution of 1920 x 1200. I ran the Guru3d Quake 4 test loop for the test at two resolutions with the same settings.
- Quality: High
- Aspect Ratio: 4:3
- AA: 8x
- AF: 16X
- Screen Resolution: 1024 x 768
At the settings above Quake 4 looked great and rand silky smooth with never a hiccup or slowdown. The average frame rate was a swift 68 FPS. The same can not be said when I changed the screen resolution from 1024 x 768 to 1920 x 1200 with all the other settings the same. At the higher screen resolution the frame rates ground down to a snail like pace of 17.9 FPS. Certainly the game was not really playable at that frame rate.
Final Thoughts on the BFG 7900GT OC Graphics Card
There is no doubt that the BFG 7900GT OC is a high performance graphics card. Plug the 7900GT OC into your system and you will be as close to gaming nirvana as you can get without chancing problems with higher clocked 7900GT's or laying out more cash for an ATI X1900XTX or the 7900GT's bigger brother the 7900GTX. Pick and choose your game settings wisely and you will certainly be able to play your favorite games with much, if not all of the eye candy on high. Throw a second BFG 7900GT OC into your system for some SLI love and you will have one of the sweetest graphics card setups going.
I can't say anything bad about the BFG 7900GT OC, it performed flawlessly and while it gave up some in benchmarks to the higher clocked 7900GT XXX version from XFX, that is not necessarily a bad thing with the over heating woes plaguing some of the oveclocked 7900GT's currently. I highly recommend the BFG 7900GT OC, you'll love it!
