by Rob Williams on October 21, 2008 in Graphics & Displays
Need a new mid-range GPU for under $200? NVIDIA’s 9800 GTX+ is a good model to keep in mind, and ASUS’ Dark Knight card in particular proves to be one well-worth considering. The card offers great gaming performance for the cash, even handling certain games at 2560×1600 with ease, has a sweet-looking cooler, and best of all, is priced-right.
Crysis Warhead might have the ability to bring any system to its knees even with what we consider to be reasonable settings, but Call of Duty 4 manages to look great regardless of your hardware, as long as it’s reasonably current. It’s also one of the few games on the market that will actually benefit from having a multi-core processor, although Quad-Cores offer no performance gain over a Dual-Core of the same frequency.
For our testing, we use a level called The Bog. The reason is simple… it looks great, plays well and happens to be incredibly demanding on the system. It takes place at night, but there is more gunfire, explosions, smoke, specular lighting and flying corpses than you can shake an assault rifle at.

Because the game runs well on all current mid-range GPUs at reasonable graphic settings, we max out what’s available to us, which includes enabling 4xAA and 8xAF, along with choosing the highest available options for everything else.



The story continues here, with the GTX+ scaling quite well when compared to the original model. It also scales well compared to the HD 4850, which costs about $20 less on average (if you look hard enough).
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Palit HD 4870 X2 2GB
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2560×1600, Max Detail, 8xAA
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113.024 FPS
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Palit GTX 280 1GB
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2560×1600, Max Detail, 8xAA
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85.440 FPS
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Palit 9800 GX2 1GB
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2560×1600, Max Detail, 4xAA
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76.192 FPS
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Palit HD 4870 512MB
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2560×1600, Max Detail, 4xAA
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64.825 FPS
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ASUS 9800 GTX+ 512MB
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2560×1600, Max Detail, 0xAA
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74.392 FPS
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ASUS 9800 GTX 512MB
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2560×1600, Max Detail, 0xAA
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70.363 FPS
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ASUS HD 4850 512MB
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2560×1600, Max Detail, 0xAA
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69.745 FPS
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Gigabyte 9600 GT 512MB
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2560×1600, Max Detail, 0xAA
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48.180 FPS
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Although the 4xAA setting at 2560×1600 as seen in our graph above was “playable” enough, it wasn’t completely fluid as we’d hope, despite running at 55FPS. Like the original 9800 GTX, disabling AA entirely boosts up performance and the game becomes much smoother.