In one word, wow is all I can say. The performance of the 8800GTX surpasses every video card on the market today, including TWO 7950 GX2s in SLI mode. The performance in many cases is limited by the CPU being used, as the strange results in Doom 3 show. But low resolution, non-FSAA AF gaming is not what you spend $600 on a video card for, so for the purposes of this review I would discount any such fluctation in performance and concentrate on the positive. Performance of the ASUS card and the XFX card are nearly identical, as the cards are identically clocked.
FSAA Performance
To show off the performance of the new card, I decided to take a look at the performance metric of the new 16x CSAA mode and the maximum mode, 16xQ. I ran all of the game tests with the new modes enabled and enabled Transparency SuperSample Anti-aliasing, gamma correct antialiasing, turned off anisotropic filtering optimizations (kept on to do as close to apples-to apples in the normal testing.) 16x mode performance is amazing, as is the image quality. The performance of 16XQ mode is less than stellar, but the card is doing a much higher level of AA.
