• You can play most modern games with maximum quality settings in the most popular resolution only on the high-end GeForce 8800 GTX, not always at that - minimum frame rates in some cases drop too low.
• New games use up to 600-700 MB of video memory. It does not mean that all these resources must be in local memory of a graphics card. Games often give resource control (textures, etc) to API, especially as Direct3D 10 uses video memory virtualization. Nevertheless, there is an apparent tendency to increase requirements to video memory size on graphics cards. So 512 MB can be considered an optimal solution now. 256-320 MB - insufficient, 0.7-1 GB - not used in games so far. But this memory size makes sense for high-end solutions, because they can provide acceptable frame rates in higher resolutions.
• We can see an evident increase in draw calls. Games may now use 2000 calls per frame, although the most optimized projects do fine with 500-1000 calls per frame. The increase of draw calls affects the growing dependence of 3D applications on CPUs - more draw calls generate a heavier load on a CPU.
• The number of draw calls grows together with the amount of processed geometry. We are not surprised to see 300000-500000 polygons per frame anymore. Most advanced games may use up to million triangles per average frame and up to 2-3 millions in extreme cases.
• Performance of a computer with the GeForce 8600 was not limited by a CPU in all tested games, it depended on the graphics card only. On the other hand, the GeForce 8800 GTX was often idle in our conditions, up to one fourth or third of the time. Conclusion: such graphics card needs either a more powerful CPU or better optimizations in games (fewer draw calls in the first place.)
• The ROP load was always low - up to 10-20% in both cases. Of course, we should take into account the FPS difference. But the number and capacities of ROPs were not the main stumbling block in our tests. The G80 and G84 demonstrate similar results, except for one case (PT Boats), probably owing to high requirements to video memory size.
• Modern games still heavily load texture units, their minimum load is 30%, up to 75% maximum (in the G80!) Plans of some companies to change the ratio between the number of texture and shader units were apparently premature - even such an advanced game as Lost Planet: Extreme Condition uses TMUs so actively.
• The load on geometry units and input assembler (it fetches geometry and other data from memory to be used by other units) in games is quite low. It never limits rendering speed, although the load on input assembler is heavier in some projects than in other games.
• Unified processors in all new games act as the main bottleneck. Their peak load in almost all games reaches 70-90%, which speaks of their full utilization. So their performance determines rendering speed. Consequently, performance of these units plays the most important role in modern games. As the G84 does not have many such units, the GeForce 8600 cannot demonstrate better results. The load on shader units in the G80 is evidently lower. This GPU has a certain performance margin of unified ALUs.
• It's now confirmed that new applications have higher requirements to shader units. The games we tested show that importance of computing units in GPUs grows, and that it will continue to grow (it slowed down a little in multiplatform projects for apparent reasons). They will become even more important, if future games use not only vertex and pixel shaders, but also geometry shaders.