Date:
Tuesday , November 16, 2004
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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GeForce 6600GT AGP Preview

The AGP version of the GeForce 6600GT is announced today. We evaluate its performance in seven of the latest games to see the value it brings to your gaming experience.

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Test Setup:

ABIT AV8 (VIA K8T800), AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 2.40GHz, 4 X 512MB Corsair XMS PC3200LLPro TwinX Dual Channel DDR400, Western Digital 74GB Raptor SATA/150, Windows XP Professional SP2 with DirectX 9.0c.

NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT AGP – Operating at default clock speeds 500MHz/900MHz using ForceWare 66.93.

ATI Radeon 9800Pro – Operating at default clock speeds 375MHz/676MHz using Catalyst 4.10.

There are quite a few people out there that still own a Radeon 9800Pro. This video card can easily be called the video card of 2003 for gaming. If you have a 9800Pro you are probably wondering what is my upgrade path? You want to get a new generation video card, but you aren’t sure if a 6600GT is really an upgrade path for you considering it is only a $199 video card. So we are going to make it very easy for you. We are going to take this 6600GT AGP and compare it directly to a Radeon 9800Pro to see if the 6600GT really is an upgrade path for those looking to upgrade from what used to be a high-end video card to the midrange video card of the 6600GT.

Remember that ATI has yet to launch their X700 in AGP form so we have not direct comparison for this preview.

As you look at the results on the following pages keep in mind the specification differences between these two video cards. The 9800Pro and 6600GT have the same amount of pixel pipelines, 8, but the 6600GT has a 128-bit memory bus but clocked much higher, whereas the 9800Pro has a 256-bit memory bus. It should be interesting to see which card comes out on top in current games.

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We are using the new ForceWare 66.93 driver. We used the default control panel settings on each video card. For the ForceWare drivers this means Trilinear optimization was ON, Anisotropic mip filter optimization was OFF and Anisotropic sample optimization was ON.

We will look at gameplay evaluation performance in seven games. We are not including screenshots in each game, because quite frankly there are absolutely no image quality differences between the 6600GT PCI-Express video card and the 6600GT AGP video card. We also noticed no differences between the 6600GT AGP video card and the Radeon 9800Pro.