The first game I decided to take a spin on the ASUS 7800GT was Half Life2 Day Of Defeat Source. HL2 was released last year and many considered it to be the Game Of The Year, even though it was delayed. The game plays wonderfully on the 7800GT, with 1280x1024 and 4x Transparency Supersampling AA and 16x Anisotropic Filtering fully playable.
The second game I tried was Age Of Empires 3 demo. This game is the sequel to one of the best-selling RTS (Real-Time Strategy) games of all time. The demo gives the player two skirmish missions and part of the campaign. The graphics in the demo are ok, for the most part, and the 7800GT handled the game like a champ.
One controversy with NVIDIA based video cards is their bug with Anisotropic Filtering, which has proved to be a problem in a few games we have seen. Battlefield 2 is one of the games that exhibits “shimmering” with the latest WHQL drivers off NVIDIA’s web site, the 78.01s. NVIDIA has released two beta drivers, 78.03 and 78.05 on their NZone website. With these drivers the “shimmering” exhibited by the 7800GT and 7800GTX cards is almost non-existent and unnoticeable.
