NVIDIA's GeForce 6600GT on AGP

http://bit-tech.net/review/371

Look out for the further NFS: Underground 2 image quality investigations... I will be working on that later today.

 

The heatsink design is pretty cool and the card seems to be spot on in most things. I wish I was using a really poor card at the moment so that I could make the excuse I needed a new one .

 

Well I've got the excuse, so if you've got the money I'm sure we could put our heads together and come up with something

<A88>

 

what size of memory was in that card 128mb or 256mb?

 

The good old 9800 Pro scrapes through again

 

The heatsink/fam combo doenst look at efficient at cooling. lol Imagine playing HL 2 on that for hours

 

I've got an idea, how about you buy it for me?

As for the cooling design, wouldn't the air be propelled away from the CPU and RAM primarily? I suppose the hot air would eventually rise, but it would be a bit cooler by then.

 

It's a 128MB frame buffer - sorry, all GeForce 6600GT's come with only 128MB.

The GeForce 6600 can have up to 256MB, though. But at the moment, there are no announcements being made about the introduction of the vanilla GeForce 6600 moving on to AGP.

 

It's actually very stable, I played through all games in the test suite for around 8-10 hours in total and didn't have a single blue screen/graphics lock up.

 

im j/w if you ever thought of compairing it to a 6800 128mb (what i have). because i would like to see if i could have waited and saved 100$ on my vid card

 

Well thanks for choosing such different colours... it makes the review so easy to read for all us colour blind folk.

[/SARCASTIC RANT]

Otherwise a nice review. Thanks.

ch424

 

what colours would you like? Pink and Yellow?

or just something a little more contrasting?

j/k - the colours aren't all *that* contrasting - I will redo the graphs tomorrow morning

 

Personally a bright green that is obviously nvidia would be preferable; correspondance between Green for Nvidia and Red for ATI would make the graphs a bit more readible without refreshing myself to see whos who. Good review though biggles; keep up the good work.

 

What sort of pricing could we expect on this or was a reading too fast and missed it again?

I was looking at the 9800 pro but this might sway me a little when my next student loan comes through hehe

 

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=14-150-080&depa=0

 

It should be priced around £150 - I've got an XFX retail sample here that is retailing at £160 iirc, but it's slightly overclocked.

 

one thing puzzled me

In your review you used the NFSU2 demo and glossed over the fact NSFU2 is not only playable at 12fps you don't even realize it's that low. I have a GeForce FX 5900XT, which is a joke compared to the current midrange cards but I was playing NFSU2 with 8xS AA and 8 AF over riding the app control becuase it was still jaggy using the slider in the game, but I remeber 12fps being a slideshow not smooth and crisp. For perspective my still images are crisper than either of the two videocards screenies... One difference is I do have the retail game and have been playing since the 8th and never realizes the fps per sec were that low, but considering that it was built with the xbox and lesser consoles in mind the fps might be aimed at older hardware. The only reason I felt I need to post this is you claim to use real games for testing did you even play the game? I find it hard to see how you could have missed the fact the frame rate seems to have no impact on what you see? Maybe I'm missing something but then again I can't see how you got rid of the jaggies under 4x AA even with a rotaed grid they were really bad on my machine at 2x.

In case it matters my cpu is an amd mobile running at 2.2Ghz, but it shouldn't matter as I still only getting 12-14 fps which I would think would be unplayable. here's a link to the screen shot with fraps running:
12 fps lol &
another image

 

The blurred image on NFS:U2 on the 6600GT is probably down to the game itself, it looks alot like the problem that NFS:U1 had with ATI cards. Have you tryed disabling some of the filters (overbright, motion blur etc) to try and get around the issue?. In NFS:U1, the "blurring" was caused by either having motion blur or light trails on, both which also disabled AA in the game, even when forced through the ATI drivers.

 

Yes please -- the green and red (at least I think they are ) are hard to tell apart because they fade to black between them. If you used more a more obvious green (brighter), that would be great! ATM, they both look orange to me!

Thanks,

ch424

 

I don't quite understand what you're saying... but I will make an assumption.

The image quality that you are seeing in the review are my implementation of the "best-playable" settings - these are subjective, but the frame rates aren't. You could have other opinions about what looks better - some prefer high AF and no AA, while some prefer lots of AA and a little AF - I've struck a balance between the two in this title, while keeping the frame rates at 100% playable levels. The minimum frame rate never drops below 30 frames per second, that is the most important frame rate, as it will determine how much "lag" you see - anything that goes below 25 fps can come across as noticeable lag.

Yes, I don't just make numbers up for a living, you know.