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Looks like even smoke in general (and not only in Brothers in Arms) can still bring the GeForce 6800GT down to its knees. We're just barely making the30 fps mark when smoke is at its heaviest. We can see the minimum fps drop even lower with FSAA and anisotropic filtering or even simply using a higher resolution. Thankfully, smoke doesn't happen all the time in the game.


Keep in mind that you can see a much lower fps in actual gameplay than what you're seeing on the graphs - mostly when entering areas with lots of smoke and vehicles. During gameplay, the actual fps can drop to around 2/3 of the minimum fps you're seeing here. Just like Splinter Cell, Brothers in Arms and Knights of the Old Republic, we see that shader laden games can still tax the GeForce 6800GT.. Don't expect high resolution gaming with these games.

Conclusion:

We could just paste the same conclusion we have with the X800XL round up since we're seeing the same thing with these cards. All of these GeForce 6800GT cards are fast, enough for comfortable gaming up to 1600 x 1200 32 bit with 4x AA and 16x AF on older games, but you really wouldn't want to use it at above 1024 x 768, 4x AA 16xAF in shader laden games, particularly newer games. Even the GeForce 6800GT still has trouble pushing 30 fps in some situations. It's actually worse in a way compared to the X800XLs because these games doesn't even make extensive use of SM 3.0 or parallax mapping and high dynamic range rendering. At least with HDR you won't have the performance hit from doing AA since both can't work at the same time. For real, fluid playable high resolution gaming you'll either have to use an SLI setup or the GeForce 7 and Radeon X1800 series.

While the Galaxy Glacier is faster in some games, the difference is not noticeable in actual gameplay. So performance is generally the same for all cards. Again, it's the features and bundle that will be the determining factor for most people. There are additional things you might like to know: None of these cards have video input, which is a shame because you could make extensive use of NVIDIA's PureVideo decoder/encoder built into the GeForce 6 series cards. There are variants with video input around, so you might want to look around a bit if you need it. None of these card also offer HDTV output. which is a shame since even the 6600GT come with HDTV output out of the box.

In all honesty, out of the three cards we test today, we recommend the Leadtek PX6800GT TDH. It has the best bundle such as applications, utilities and games. But the most important fact is that the Leadtek PX6800GT TDH comes equipped with a supreme hardware monitoring system that's just phenomenal. There are some caveats - if you're planning to use two of these in an SLI setup, be sure to take additional measures to make sure the card gets enough cool air. You might want to consider cards with single slot solutions such as the ASUS EN6800GT instead.

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