Overclocking The NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+ Video Card

3DMark Vantage

3DMark Vantage is the new industry standard PC gaming performance benchmark from Futuremark, newly designed for Windows Vista and DirectX10. It includes two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests, several new feature tests, and support for the latest hardware. 3DMark Vantage is based on a completely new rendering engine, developed specifically to take full advantage of DirectX10, the new graphics API from Microsoft.

Default 3DMark06 settings were used for testing, so a resolution of 1280×1024 was used.

It should be noted that the new GeForce 9800 GTX+ supports PhysX with an additional driver installation. With the NVIDIA PhysX driver v8.06.12 installed along with the Forceware 177.39 driver, the GeForce 9800 GTX, GTX 280 and GTX 260 video cards become physics processors. This new capability extends physics simulation beyond the limited capabilities of the CPU, enabling incredible performance scalability by leveraging the power of the graphics processor. Today you can test two applications to show off PhysX: 3DMark Vantage and Unreal Tournament 3. We tested just the GeForce 9800 GTX+ with the new Physics driver to show off what it means for performance.

Test Results: The overclocked GeForce 9800 GTX+ helped improve the overall 3DMark Vantage score by 16.7% and the CPU score by 18.6%!

Final Thoughts:

Overclocking the GeForce 9800 GTX+ improves gaming performance across the board by 15% on average! The new 55nm ‘refresh’ that NVIDIA has completed on the G92 core didn’t seem to have any negative impact on overclocking and the performance numbers are pretty solid as you can tell from our benchmarks. That is all we have on our end as it is the weekend and we plan on taking a couple days off before we bring you more video card reviews next week. It will be intersting to see how the ATI Radeon HD 4870 does compared to this card and the GeForce GTX 260! We have a busy week ahead, but the battle between ATI and NVIDIA make it worth the time and effort!