Ruslan74
26th April 2007, 10:38 AM
click me! for the whole article (http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/nvidia_geforce_8600_gts_preview/)
With DX10 games right around the corner, gamers looking to upgrade for these games haven’t had many options, particularly if you’re on a budget. The only real semi-inexpensive option up to this point has been the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB, but with a $300 MSRP, it’s not exactly what many would call an economical upgrade. The real sweet spot of the mainstream segment is the $150-$200 price point.
To service this market, NVIDIA has developed a new line of GPUs: the GeForce 8600 and GeForce 8500, which are based on NVIDIA’s new G84 and G86 graphics cores. NVIDIA has incorporated many of the key technologies already found in GeForce 8800 into the GeForce 8600 and GeForce 8500, only they’ve been tweaked to be cheaper to produce. In fact, thanks to a tweaked video processing engine which offloads more fuctions, the new GPUs reduce CPU utilization for H.264 movies, allowing them to play back Blu-ray and HD-DVD movies without needing a high-end CPU.
And the final words :
With today’s introduction of the GeForce 8600 GTS and GeForce 8600 GT, NVIDIA has finally brought DirectX 10 graphics to the masses. But does it deliver?
In comparison to its direct predecessor, the GeForce 7600 GT, the GeForce 8600 GTS provides a substantial improvement in performance. Overall the GeForce 8600 GTS cards ran around 30-35% faster than the GeForce 7600 GT, although there were cases such as Half-Life 2 Lost Coast and STALKER where the difference was even greater. Based on these results, the GeForce 8600 GTS clearly looks like a winner.
When comparing its performance to newer sub-$200 mainstream cards like the GeForce 7900 GS and Radeon X1950 Pro however, the results are more mixed. In shader-intensive situations like we find in Oblivion and STALKER the GeForce 8600 GTS is able to pull ahead – in fact it even outperformed the GeForce 7950 GT in our testing with both of these games. But in many of today’s games which aren’t as shader-intensive and hit the memory subsystem harder thanks to our use of high levels of AA, the GeForce 8600 GTS often falls behind, particularly in comparison to the Radeon X1950 Pro. The GeForce 8600 just doesn’t have the memory bandwidth to keep up with the X1950 Pro in these situations.
Based on this, if you’re contemplating upgrading to a GeForce 8600 GT/GTS, or going with an older DX9 card with a 256-bit memory interface, you’re just going to have to decide which is more important to you, the games of today, or the games of tomorrow.
If today’s games are more important to you, then you may want to pick up a Radeon X1950 Pro or GeForce 7900 GS card. These cards are both set to be displaced by the latest DX10 cards from AMD and NVIDIA, so deals on them will be readily available until supply slowly dries up. Also keep in mind that today’s numbers were based on a stock GeForce 7900 GS card – many of the board’s you’ll find at retail are factory overclocked, delivering better performance than the numbers we presented today. Considering this, picking up a 7900 GS or X1950 Pro card may be even more tempting if you can find a nice deal.
And in case you’ve got one of these cards already, we really don’t see any reason to upgrade to a GeForce 8600 GTS unless you really play a lot of STALKER and Oblivion.
Of course, AMD won’t be standing still for much longer, so we really can’t come to any final conclusions on who will ultimately win the DX10 mainstream battle for many more weeks. If you absolutely must buy today, the GeForce 8600 GTS is by default the mainstream card of choice right now, but that’s obviously because it has no direct competitor. That’s supposedly going to change very shortly though so we can’t come to any definitive conclusions until then. What we can say however is that the GeForce 8600 GTS and 8600 GT are clearly a nice step in the right direction for NVIDIA, but we can’t quite tell if they’ve delivered another bestseller at the mainstream price point just yet with the GeForce 8600 GTS and GT. We honestly wouldn’t be surprised if NVIDIA has more performance optimizations up their sleeves with newer drivers either.
But with its solid feature set, including an improved video engine (dedicated article coming shortly), DX10 functionality, and good performance in today’s DX9 games, there’s a lot to like in NVIDIA’s latest mainstream GPU. It isn't the knockout punch many were expecting, but it remains to be seen if AMD will be able to exploit this with their upcoming DX10 card. We'll just have to wait and see how it all plays out over the coming weeks.
/me waits for SA pricing.
With DX10 games right around the corner, gamers looking to upgrade for these games haven’t had many options, particularly if you’re on a budget. The only real semi-inexpensive option up to this point has been the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB, but with a $300 MSRP, it’s not exactly what many would call an economical upgrade. The real sweet spot of the mainstream segment is the $150-$200 price point.
To service this market, NVIDIA has developed a new line of GPUs: the GeForce 8600 and GeForce 8500, which are based on NVIDIA’s new G84 and G86 graphics cores. NVIDIA has incorporated many of the key technologies already found in GeForce 8800 into the GeForce 8600 and GeForce 8500, only they’ve been tweaked to be cheaper to produce. In fact, thanks to a tweaked video processing engine which offloads more fuctions, the new GPUs reduce CPU utilization for H.264 movies, allowing them to play back Blu-ray and HD-DVD movies without needing a high-end CPU.
And the final words :
With today’s introduction of the GeForce 8600 GTS and GeForce 8600 GT, NVIDIA has finally brought DirectX 10 graphics to the masses. But does it deliver?
In comparison to its direct predecessor, the GeForce 7600 GT, the GeForce 8600 GTS provides a substantial improvement in performance. Overall the GeForce 8600 GTS cards ran around 30-35% faster than the GeForce 7600 GT, although there were cases such as Half-Life 2 Lost Coast and STALKER where the difference was even greater. Based on these results, the GeForce 8600 GTS clearly looks like a winner.
When comparing its performance to newer sub-$200 mainstream cards like the GeForce 7900 GS and Radeon X1950 Pro however, the results are more mixed. In shader-intensive situations like we find in Oblivion and STALKER the GeForce 8600 GTS is able to pull ahead – in fact it even outperformed the GeForce 7950 GT in our testing with both of these games. But in many of today’s games which aren’t as shader-intensive and hit the memory subsystem harder thanks to our use of high levels of AA, the GeForce 8600 GTS often falls behind, particularly in comparison to the Radeon X1950 Pro. The GeForce 8600 just doesn’t have the memory bandwidth to keep up with the X1950 Pro in these situations.
Based on this, if you’re contemplating upgrading to a GeForce 8600 GT/GTS, or going with an older DX9 card with a 256-bit memory interface, you’re just going to have to decide which is more important to you, the games of today, or the games of tomorrow.
If today’s games are more important to you, then you may want to pick up a Radeon X1950 Pro or GeForce 7900 GS card. These cards are both set to be displaced by the latest DX10 cards from AMD and NVIDIA, so deals on them will be readily available until supply slowly dries up. Also keep in mind that today’s numbers were based on a stock GeForce 7900 GS card – many of the board’s you’ll find at retail are factory overclocked, delivering better performance than the numbers we presented today. Considering this, picking up a 7900 GS or X1950 Pro card may be even more tempting if you can find a nice deal.
And in case you’ve got one of these cards already, we really don’t see any reason to upgrade to a GeForce 8600 GTS unless you really play a lot of STALKER and Oblivion.
Of course, AMD won’t be standing still for much longer, so we really can’t come to any final conclusions on who will ultimately win the DX10 mainstream battle for many more weeks. If you absolutely must buy today, the GeForce 8600 GTS is by default the mainstream card of choice right now, but that’s obviously because it has no direct competitor. That’s supposedly going to change very shortly though so we can’t come to any definitive conclusions until then. What we can say however is that the GeForce 8600 GTS and 8600 GT are clearly a nice step in the right direction for NVIDIA, but we can’t quite tell if they’ve delivered another bestseller at the mainstream price point just yet with the GeForce 8600 GTS and GT. We honestly wouldn’t be surprised if NVIDIA has more performance optimizations up their sleeves with newer drivers either.
But with its solid feature set, including an improved video engine (dedicated article coming shortly), DX10 functionality, and good performance in today’s DX9 games, there’s a lot to like in NVIDIA’s latest mainstream GPU. It isn't the knockout punch many were expecting, but it remains to be seen if AMD will be able to exploit this with their upcoming DX10 card. We'll just have to wait and see how it all plays out over the coming weeks.
/me waits for SA pricing.