GeForce 8800GTS @ 1280 x 1024
GeForce 8600GTS/GT @ 1280 x 1024
Virtually no difference. The wiper on the windshield does look slightly 'better' on the GeForce 8600 shots, but that's likely very subjective.
In a quick glance, there is practically no difference in image quality between the GeForce 8600 and GeForce 8800 series. The good news is that this means you can enjoy the same image quality at much affordable prices. Of course, there's still performance to be considered. What kind of frame rates can we expect with these kind settings? Undoubtedly, we can expect a difference in performance, but is the frame rates playable enough? Let's look at the performance of the GeForce 8600GTS and GT.
Performance
Graphical settings for these games are set to their highest possible values. The objective is of course to push these graphics cards to the limit. Notable differences are F.E.A.R where we disable "Soft Shadows", Quake 4 where we use High Quality - not Ultra Quality. Anisotropic filtering in Quake 4 was set to "1" for default tests and "16" for AA / AF tests. We used Serious Sam II built in "Maximum" quality preset then change resolution and AA / AF settings accordingly. All of these settings can be seen here. Our TES IV: Oblivion settings are as close as we can get to Ultra High Quality - you can see our test settings here. For Need for Speed: Carbon, we used the game's "Maximum" video quality preset, but change the filtering to "Trilinear" for default tests - AA AF tests are run with "4x" and "Anistropic". Since there is no timedemo in NFS: Carbon, we used the Sprint Race on Lincoln Boulevard for testing. Last, you can see the settings we used for GTR 2 here. Clear weather was used for our run of Monza GP tests.We'd like to thank Tagan for supplying the additional power supply and Gigabyte for supplying both the Gigabyte P965-DS3P and Radeon X1950 Pro for this article. And of course, thanks to ASUS for lending us their EN8600GTS, EN8600GT and the EN7950GT. Price wise, these cards with the exception of the GeForce 8600GT is priced at the same level - US$ 200 - give or take a few dollars.
Our test setup
Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 socket LGA-775 (running at 7 x 400 MHz)
4 x 512 MB A-DATA Vitesta 5-5-5-18 PC6400 DDR2-SDRAM
Gigabyte P965-DS3P Intel P965 motherboard
Maxtor DiamondMaxPlus9 80 GBs Serial ATA 8 MB buffer
LiteOn 1673S DVD-RW
Tagan TG530-U15 530 watts ATX/BTX power supply
Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed
ATI Catalyst 7.3 reference driver
NVIDIA Forceware 93.71 reference driver (for the GeForce 7950GT)
NVIDIA Forceware 158.22 reference driver (for the GeForce 8600GTS / 8600GT)
Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility 8.1.0.1006
DirectX 9.0c
all respected games used for benchmarks have been updated to their latest,final builds.
The graphs are pretty self explanatory, but in case you can't see the text, they're arranged in groups of three colors: green for minimum fps, blue for average fps and red for maximum fps. The first group of graphs are results taken with default settings - AA and AF is not enabled. The second group of results are results with 4x AA and 16x AF.
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