Image Quality

So far we have done a lot of talking about playable frame rates and smoothness of play with all the settings on.  Let's have a peak at what these max settings look like to give you a better idea of the quality the 7800 GTX is capable of.  The first screen shot below are from Half Life 2 with the second being from HL2: The Lost Coast.  Both of these images are viewable at their true 1600 x 1200 size so you can inspect them both close up and at your leisure.  On close examination over time, imperfections can indeed be found but the image quality far surpasses anything I have ever seen. 

Overclocking

Having finished the standard gamut of gaming runs it was time to turn up the heat.  The stock card's core and memory are set to 430/1200MHz respectively.  Using Coolbits, we amped up the speed just shy of the point of seeing visual abnormalities.  Our max overclock was 479/1370MHz.  Surprisingly, we didn't see any measurable performance increase.  I fell back into a few time demo runs and only got a boost of around 3% which is nice but won't start that flow of letters to momma.