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
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.
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Pete - Tuesday, November 16, 2004 - link
Great article, Anand. Are you sure about your 9700P numbers for Far Cry, though? They seem awfully low, especially in relation to a 5900XT.SlinkyDink - Tuesday, November 16, 2004 - link
/*The AGP version of the 6600GT obviously lacks SLI support given that you can only have a single AGP slot on a motherboard.*/Actually I believe that AGP 3.0 specs allow up two AGP slots (and both could be used used at once), but nobody ever decided to implement it :P
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, November 16, 2004 - link
I am not treating NVIDIA's Video Processor as a feature of any NV4x GPU until NVIDIA provides a working driver and commits to a public release date. The 6600GT AGP supposedly has the same video processor that the PCI Express version has (since they are the same GPU), but to this date NVIDIA has failed to deliver a working driver set to take advantage of it.Take care,
Anand
slurmsmackenzie - Tuesday, November 16, 2004 - link
#28....remember, the point is that ati didn't have a bridge in the works at the release of the x700, so now that it has become apparent that agp is still the front running solution, they're behind it it's agp equivelant releases. so, as far as agp interface is concerned, the closest ati comparison is the 9800.
vailr - Tuesday, November 16, 2004 - link
Any comments on: comparing the hardware video decoding, of the 6600 vs. the (reportedly faulty)6800; and overall video quality, in comparison with ATI's offerings?For those people interested in the best cost-to-performance video solution, for Home Theater PC use.
Thanks.
Cybercat - Tuesday, November 16, 2004 - link
They couldn't have been using the NF4 reference motherboard, these are all AGP cards. Also, why is it that the 9800 Pro does 63% better than the 9700 Pro in FarCry? At most that card is around 30% better. Did you guys really rerun the tests with the 9700 Pro using the latest drivers, or did you merely recycle some of the numbers?marcnakm - Tuesday, November 16, 2004 - link
The card I was waiting for.Good review, just missing the comparison with the regular 6800 which is very important.
Regs - Tuesday, November 16, 2004 - link
This review shows a lot of things. One of them was how the FX series was a horrible failure.draazeejs - Tuesday, November 16, 2004 - link
Did nVidia pay for this article? Is it really fair to put up this card against a 2-years old card, like R9800Pro? As far as I understood, the X700 should be the real competitor for 6600GT, because the X700 is supposed to be in the same price cathegory, no? There have been numerous reviews of the X700 on the net, why not include it here???Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, November 16, 2004 - link
The impact of the bridge, as I mentioned in the review, is negligible. The bridge + slower memory results in a 0 - 5% performance difference between the PCI Express and AGP versions of the 6600GT (the 5% figure being because of the additional memory bandwidth courtesy of the 500/1000 clock vs. 500/900).Just so you guys know, I went out and picked up a vanilla 6800 for inclusion in my upcoming Half Life 2 GPU comparison. Know that your voice has been heard :)
Take care,
Anand