Date:
Tuesday , September 07, 2004
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT Preview

NVIDIA has provided a reference sample of their mainstream killer, the GeForce 6600GT. We put it under the full load of our evaluation suite. Inside we evaluate the 6600GT's gameplay performance and image quality using six real-world games and come away with some surprising results.

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Test Setup:

ABIT AA8 (Intel 925X), Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4GHz downclocked to 3GHz (15x200), 2 X 512MB Corsair XMS2 5400C4Pro Dual Channel DDR2, Western Digital 74GB Raptor SATA/150, Windows XP Professional SP2 with DirectX 9.0c.

NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT – Operating at default clock speeds 500MHz/1GHz using ForceWare 65.76.

ATI Radeon X600XT – Operating at default clock speeds 500MHz/730MHz using Catalyst 4.8.

For our comparison today we will take the NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT and compare it with the ATI Radeon X600XT since that is the closest video card we have for competition from ATI at this time at that price range.

We are using a PCI-Express Intel 925X platform with the ABIT AA8 and a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition CPU for testing. We have downclocked this CPU to 3GHz for these video cards. 2.8GHz is the slowest CPU sold in the socket 775 family. Our results here should very closely represent a 3.2GHz non-EE Pentium 4.

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We are using a newer ForceWare driver as well. 65.76 is a WHQL candidate driver provided by NVIDIA. With the ForceWare 65.76 driver there are some new filtering optimizations. We used the default settings for each. As you can see above, Trilinear Optimization was ON, Anisotropic Mip Filter Optimization was OFF, and Anisotropic Sample Optimization was ON. Please remember we feel optimizations in the true sense of the word are a good thing, and we will continue to use the default optimization settings in the drivers for both ATI and NVIDIA.

Please be aware we test our video cards a bit different from what is the norm. We concentrate on examining the real-world gameplay that each video card provides. Gameplay includes performance and image quality evaluation. We have two sections, “Highest Playable” and “Apples to Apples”. The Highest Playable section shows the best Image Quality delivered at a playable frame rate. Following the Highest Playable section we have a brief Apples to Apples performance section for those that find benefit of framerates with matching IQ.

For easy navigation each game tested is on its own page which can be selected from the navigation menu at the bottom right of each page. You can also click straight to each section from here.