We have four tests lined up to check out how the Black Cards fare. We have one synthetic benchmark: Futuremark 3DMark Vantage for Windows Vista, and three real-world game benchmarks: Crysis, World in Conflict, and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

 

Battle of the GTX-es

First, lets take a look at the two single-GPU GTX cards.

 

 

Things don't look quite rosy here. The mother of 2007 graphics cards is hot on the heels of the overclocked GeForce 9800 GTX. If you made a mental calculation, it's quite obvious that a stock 9800 GTX might take a beating from the dated 8800 GTX.

 

 

 

Yes, the XFX GeForce 9800 GTX 512MB Black Edition manages to pull away from the GeForce 8800 GTX...

 

 

 

Surprise, surprise... The older GeForce 8800 GTX manages to wrestle the lead from the overclocked GeForce 9800 GTX in this title.

 

 

 

After some fluffed feathers and a few expletives hurled in utter disbelief, order is restored with the Black Card resuming pole position in ET: QW...

 

In short, the GeForce 9800 GTX is crippled by its 256-bit memory bus and 512MB memory. It may have much higher clockspeeds than a default GeForce 8800 GTX, but the latter runs on a wider 384-bit memory bus giving it much more memory bandwidth, and not forgetting it has 768MB of memory...

The fault does not lie with the XFX GeForce 9800 GTX Black Edition itself. In fact, the Black Edition with its high factory overclock, finally levelled the playing ground between the 8800 GTX and 9800 GTX cards.

 

 

 

 

GX2 vs. GX2: Who's the boss?

 

 

The XFX GeForce 9800 GX2 1GB Black Edition bests the score of a standard GeForce 9800 GX2 on the difficult Futuremark 3DMark Vantage by almost a thousand points.

 

 

 

We're getting above 60 frames per second for Crysis at 2560 x 1600.

 

 

 

World in Conflict gets a nice little boost from the added speed found in the GX2 Black Edition.

 

 

 

A few frames improvement across the board, but we get a big jump when we got to a high resolution of 2560 x 1600.