A Direct Comparison of Radeon X700 Pro and GeForce 6600GT
PCI Express x16 graphics cardsChipset Radeon X700 Pro 256 MB, 128 bit, GeForce 6600 128 MB, 128 bit
Last week, we featured two round up articles – the Radeon X700 Pro and the GeForce 6600GT round up. Some of you may wonder why we didn't directly compare both cards. This article is the answer. You might be surprise by the outcome: while NVIDIA does have the faster hardware, we still recommend Radeon X700 Pro over the GeForce 6600GT. Now, before you start flaming and shouting 'fanboy', permit us to present our case.
There are several reasons why we put off doing direct comparison between Radeon X700 Pro and GeForce 6600GT. During testing for the round ups, we used a slightly older driver (Catalyst 5.4 and Forceware 71.22, if you haven't noticed). Since then, we've upgraded to the latest final release from both ATI and NVIDIA, which is Catalyst 5.7 and (still) Forceware 77.72. Another reason was to investigate a driver bug, which to our dismay is still present on the Forceware 77.72. This bug causes very slow performance in F1 Career Challenge when shadows are used at full detail. Lowering shadow detail results in shadows not rendering at all. This has prompted us to perform additional testing with old drivers, the Forceware 66.81, which debut around the same time as the GeForce 6600GT. To make the comparison fair, we also perform additional testing with Catalyst 4.12. These additional testing leads us to another discovery: there is a rendering 'bug' with Splinter Cell present in Forceware 71.22 and 77.72. The 'bug' affects how the ocean's ripple are portrayed in the Caspian Oil Refinery demo, which are done with pixel shaders. As you can see from the screenshots, this really affects the overall image quality. This bug is not present in Forceware 66.81.
Of course, this complicates things. It reeks of 'shader replacement', a practice not unfamiliar with NVIDIA. This 'bug' or whatever you want to call it may affect benchmark results. We say 'may', because we have no idea just how much (if any) influence these bug have on the results: in general, Forceware 77.72 (and 71.22) is slower by 1 fps than the 66.81. So, we conduct even more additional testing with the included official demo, the 1_1_2TbilisiDemo.bin. This demo performs much alike the Beyond3D demo, but lacks the ocean pixel shader. Results are similar (slower or faster by 1 fps).
Optimizations issues aside, these 'bugs' complicate evaluation: do we evaluate the cards using old or newer drivers? Is it fair to use older drivers in the evaluation because the GeForce 6600GT has 'bugs' which the Radeon X700 does not have? To answer all these questions (and more), we've decided to conduct test with both old and new drivers for both cards. This way users can still see the performance of the cards without the presence of bugs we have found. We also expanded the benchmarks to include more games, not just our usual graphics and system benchmarks but also other, older games we could get our hands on. A backward looking review, you might say. We're pretty sure this paints a more clear picture of what these cards offer not just for the FPS oriented crowd, but also appeals to the general gamer. We want to see if there are other 'bugs' present in Forceware 77.72. Of course, this will also let us evaluate driver progress from both NVIDIA and ATI. Except for the two games (Splinter Cell and F1 Career Challenge), just how much performance is lost or gained with a new driver in older games? The obligatory image test are also expanded to include older drivers, infact it is this testing that showed us the Splinter Cell 'bug' in the first place. However, due to time constraints, we didn't perform exhaustive performance and image comparisons test for the additional games (system benchmarks and extra games). However, we do still take note the image quality on these extra games. Testing are limited to 1024 x 768, 32 bit with and without 4x AA and 16x AF. These settings are what users of both cards are generally using anyhow (and they perform less than stellar at higher resolutions). We didn't update the game, partly because we didn't have time and also because we want to see just how 'compatible' the cards are. So, any performance loss and image quality differences may be caused by outdated binaries.
[Previous Page]
[Go to top]
[Next Page]