NVIDIA's GeForce 6600GT AGP: The Little Bridge that Could

The Test

AMD Athlon 64 FX-55
2 x 512MB OCZ PC3200 EL Dual Channel DIMMs 2-2-2-10
MSI K8N Neo2 nForce3 Motherboard
ATI Catalyst 4.11 Drivers
NVIDIA ForceWare 66.93 Drivers

Doom 3 Performance

Since even before its release Doom 3 has clearly been an NVIDIA selling point. It is built around OpenGL, and preliminary benchmarks showed NVIDIA hardware running Doom 3 faster than ATI a year before the game's release. The end product doesn't seem to have deviated from the initial track, and surely NVIDIA couldn't be happier. We see here that the 6600GT is outperforming ATI's 12 pipe x800 Pro part with the the 6800 GT setting the bar on performance very high.

Under Doom 3 the 6600GT is a very powerful midrange card. Our resolution scaling graph shows a card with a profile that exceeds that of the x800 Pro. All of the previous generation cards fall a good distance behind the top three contenders in this test.

When 4x AA is enabled under Doom 3, the 6600GT dips under the x800 Pro in resolution scaleing. The 6600GT is still a midrange card, and 4xAA at high resolutions is going to be easier to handle on the higher end x800. The 6600GT puts in a very good showing overall.