NVIDIA GeForce 7800GTX Linux Preview

Due to complications with some of our Linux graphics benchmarks, we were forced to use two independent systems for testing of the NVIDIA GeForce 7800GTX. These complications came from UMark Linux Beta 3, used to benchmark Unreal Tournament 2004, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory 2.60. When building UMark on our x86_64 Linux systems, we experienced issues with segmentation faults when running the program. We attempted to fix these segmentation faults but without delaying this article any longer, we turned to one of our i386 testbeds. Furthermore, when running Enemy Territory on our 64-bit systems, OpenGL failed to initialize even with the 32-bit libraries installed. For both UMark and Enemy Territory we attempted to change the reported x86_64 architecture to linux32 in these environments, but we still experienced these faults. The testbed we used for benchmarking Unreal Tournament 2004 and RTCW: Enemy Territory is listed below.

Rather than using the Intel 32-bit system for all of our benchmarking, as the CPU can be rather restrictive on these benchmarks, we utilized one of our Athlon 64 solutions for doing our id Software Doom 3 testing. Our Athlon 64 system contained the following components:

Although we could have thrown in a new dual core CPU or Athlon FX processor, we aimed our test systems for the more budgeted computer enthusiast to see the 7800GTX benefits from a very recent, but not as powerful, Linux computer system. For some interesting comparisons and to demonstrate the rather poor performance of the 7800GTX and the NVIDIA 1.0-7667 drivers, we threw the Leadtek WinFast PX7800GTX 256MB GDDR3 VIVO against a Gigabyte 6600GT (GV-NX66T128) 128MB PCI Express graphics card in our Pentium 4 testbed and a Leadtek WinFast PX6600GT TDH 128MB PCI Express graphics card in the Athlon 64 testbed. Both of these PCI Express 6600GT, which are rated for 500/1000MHz (VPU/MEM), are considered to be mainstream so it should theoretically offer some interesting results compared against the flagship 7800GTX.