NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT: Bringing NV4x to the Masses

The Test

As of yet, ATI does not have a comparable part to the 6600 or the 6600 GT. They are working on bringing an R4xx based midrange chip out at some point in the future, but we haven't gotten any concrete details about possible parts yet. For this review, we took a look at the X600 XT as a comparison point, but as it turns out, this isn't as helpful as we had hoped. The major problem is that we wanted a good comparison with current and previous generation GPUs, and the only way we could effectively do that was by comparing AGP cards to these PCI Express solutions. As such, most of the numbers other than the 6600 GT and the X600 XT have been run on our 3400+ graphics system. The Doom 3 and Source Engine AGP benchmarks were run on the overclocked FX53, and so aren't as comparable to the rest of the world.

But we feel that this is an acceptable setup in light of the fact that PCI Express systems will have to compete with AGP systems. Our graphics test platform is based on AMD, and this serves us well enough in simply comparing how well the 6600 does in modern games (which are mostly graphics limited anyway). As long as the processor is powerful enough to keep from becoming a large bottleneck we will have a clue about NV43 performance. And we feel we've accomplished this. Here's our test setup.

Performance Test Configuration
Processor(s):	AMD Athlon 64 3400+ AMD Athlon 64 FX53 (oc to 2.6GHz) Intel Pentium 4 3.4GHz EE
RAM:	2 x 512Mb OCZ 3500 Platinum Ltd (2:3: 2:10) 2 x 512MB Micron DDR2 533
Hard Drives	Seagate 120GB 7200 RPM (8MB Buffer)
Video AGP & IDE Bus Master Drivers	VIA Hyperion 4.51 Intel Chipset INF 6.0.1.1002
Video Card(s):	NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT NVIDIA GeForce 6800 NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 ATI Radeon X800 XT Platinum Ed. ATI Radeon X800 Pro ATI Radeon 9800 XT ATI Radeon 9700 Pro ATI Radeon X600 XT
Video Drivers:	ATI Catalyst 4.6 ATI Catalyst 4.8 NVIDIA ForceWare 61.77 NVIDIA ForceWare 65.37
Operating System(s):	Windows XP Professional SP2
Motherboards:	MSI MS-6702E (VIA K8T800 Pro Chipset) FIC K8T800 Intel D925XCV

The 61.77 drivers were used on all but the 6600 GT, which was powered by the 65.37 beta drivers. On the ATI side, most of the numbers shown here were run with the 4.6 Catalyst, except the X600 XT which was run with the 4.8 version.