NVIDIA's GeForce 6600GT AGP: The Little Bridge that Could
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 16, 2004 12:15 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Counterstrike: Source Visual Stress Test
This time around, we look at a game where ATI has had a long time in the lime light. Valve has pushed Radeon cards as the way to go for Source engine based games, DirectX 9.0 based game engines have tended to favor ATI hardware at least as much as OpenGL has favored NVIDIA hardware. As such, the x800 Pro outperforms the 6600GT by a good ammount. The 9800 Pro is still lagging a good bit behind, which is a good sign for those who want an intermediate AGP upgrade and don't want to wait. People who have owned top of the line cards can get a performance improvement for midrange prices.
While the x800 Pro and 6800 GT scale about the same, the 6600GT does drop off a bit faster. The card does maintain a comfortable margine above the 9800 Pro though.
The older high end card can handle AA better than the 6600GT, and so scales a little better with resolution under 4xAA and the Source VST. At 1280x1024 the 9800 Pro very nearly catches up to the 6600GT.
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Avalon - Tuesday, November 16, 2004 - link
Thank you for taking our concerns into consideration, Anand :)coldpower27 - Tuesday, November 16, 2004 - link
That's intresting, how the 6800 GT dips like that in Sims 2 performance at 12x10, do you have any reason why? Even stranger still how the X800 Pro seems to be actually beating the 6800 GT in this particular game in high res. However it's FPS seems to be limited to 40FPS max across the board :S. Also could you possibly bench the Sims 2 under 1152x864, I would like to see what the performance of the 6800 GT is at that res for this game.Oh good review, would like a 300/700 6800 LE 8x1/4 and 325/700 6800 Vanilla 12x1/5 tested as well. To see how those compare to these cards,
ciwell - Tuesday, November 16, 2004 - link
Hmm...try to get the BFG OC one then...:D :D
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, November 16, 2004 - link
Thanks for the comments. We did not have a vanilla 6800 available for testing for this review, but as soon as we get one in we will make sure to include it in our upcoming reviews.Take care,
Anand
ciwell - Tuesday, November 16, 2004 - link
Yeah, I am wondering where the vanilla 6800 is too? It clearly is in direct competition with the 6600GT.ciwell - Tuesday, November 16, 2004 - link
CU - Tuesday, November 16, 2004 - link
I would also like to know why the 6800nu is not included. The message may not be so clear if the 6800nu was included.9700prolover - Tuesday, November 16, 2004 - link
I love the last sentense. Even the writer of anandtech loves the "the message is clear, xxx wins/fails" style of conclusion.Avalon - Tuesday, November 16, 2004 - link
Where was the vanilla 6800? You can get a BFG 6800 OC at Outpost for $249.99, and it's in stock at this moment. I recall the 6800 beating the 6600GT in 60% of benchmarks, while losing out in 40% of benchmarks. If the 6600GT is going to cost $225, that won't be much fun. I'd rather take the BFG 6800 and unlock the pipes and vertex shaders, artifact permitting.Decoder - Tuesday, November 16, 2004 - link
What about the video decoding issues on the NVidia chips? Has that been resolved?http://techreport.com/ja.zz?comments=7535