Test Rig Configuration

That's it about the card itself, from a hardware and design point of view. Leaving you all with a first impression of the Point of View GeForce 8600 GTS we are going to move to the performance you can expect from this graphics accelerator. The system used to compile and analyze the gaming performance figures is build around the high-end Intel Core 2 Duo technology, which will provide extensive central processing power supporting the G84 visual and processing capabilities. We are using our new and high performing system based around the Intel 975X Express chipset powering our mainboard. So, let's go through the system specifications...

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 1.86GHz Dual Core Processor
• ASUS P5W Digital Home Deluxe (i975X) Mainboard
• Crucial Ballistix 2GB PC2-8000 Dual Channel Memory
• Point of View GeForce 8600 GTS 256MB Graphics Card
• PowerColor Radeon X1950 PRO 256MB Graphics Card
• Western Digital 320GB Caviar SE 8MB Cache Hard Disk
• Speeze RockeTeer 600W (SLI Ready) Power Supply
• Spire Pininfarina SP-ATX-PALU Silver Tower Case
• Arctic Cooling MX-2 Performance Thermal Compound
• Dell UltraSharp 30" 3007WFP (Black) LCD Flat Display
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional incl. SP2 Edition

As you can see we have used the some high performance components, and we would like to thank Crucial and Point of View for their generosity on supplying us with some excellent hardware. The ASUS mainboard is based around the Intel 975X chipset supporting the Intel Core 2 Duo processor and DDR2 memory. We will be using our modest Core 2 Duo E6300 but running at 2.8GHz to support the high-end graphics cards. So both the mainboard and CPU are fine tuned to support this overclocking, to provide the maximum compatible and stable clock speeds. Throughout the benchmarking and gaming analysis we are using the new ForceWare 158.16 drivers provided by NVIDIA along with the introduction of the GeForce 8600 series.

Synthetic Benchmarks

As usual we start of the benchmark analysis by going through the different benchmark suites coming from Futuremark, and the discontinued AquaMark 3 program. These will provide a good indication on the game play of today's games. First we will start with AquaMark 3, followed by 3DMark03, 3DMark05, then last but not least 3DMark06. We will reboot our system each time for each of the four synthetic API's used and leave all processes running in the background. We put the Point of View GeForce 8600 GTS accelerator against the Radeon X1950 PRO 256MB graphics card provided by PowerColor, and doing so analyze the performance figures. So let's just give it a go...

Massive AquaMark 3

One of the benchmark suite which was very popular and still is somehow, is known as AquaMark 3 and is a fully DirectX 9.0 compatible benchmark from Massive Development. Unfortunately the programmers, Massive Development, don't exist anymore but that doesn't mean it isn't a great tool. To be able to see how well a graphics card is performing under the challenging DirectX 9.0 environment, AquaMark 3 was developed. However it is not solely a DirectX 9.0 benchmark; if you are working with an older DirectX compatible graphics card, you will still be able to use it just with a lot of graphical features missing. Make no mistake, AquaMark 3 is a DirectX 9.0 benchmark, as it is based on a real game engine it has fallbacks to previous DirectX versions.

Benchmark Results - 1280x1024 - E6300 2.80GHz - 2GB RAM
	Radeon X1950 PRO 256MB	AquaMark 3 Score
0x AA/4x AF	575/1380MHz (Ref - Single)	97357
4x AA/16x AF	575/1380MHz (Ref - Single)	75291
	GeForce 8600 GTS 256MB	AquaMark 3 Score
0x AA/4x AF	675/2000MHz (Ref - Single)	117011
4x AA/16x AF	675/2000MHz (Ref - Single)	76715
Results Interpretation: Higher index values are better.

Having run the oldest benchmark first we can see that the GeForce 8600 GTS comes out on top when comparing to the Radeon X1950 PRO performance. Although the difference is reduced to a small margin when antialiasing and anisotropic filtering is enabled, the GeForce 8600 GTS remains slightly ahead. We do have to mention that the architecture of both cards is very different and you can't really draw a direct line. However the GeForce 8600 GTS is clearly higher clocked, but features only 32 stream processors to play with, while the Radeon X1950 PRO has 36 pixel shaders. Due to the optimized and unified shader technology of the Point of View GeForce 8600 GTS we see that even for the older gaming engines it can deliver a better experience.

Futuremark 3DMark03

To get started we first go back to actually an older benchmark suite from Futuremark. By combining full DirectX 9.0a support with completely new tests and graphics, 3DMark03 continues the legacy of being the industry standard benchmark. The high quality game tests, image quality tests, sound tests and others give you an extremely accurate overview of your system’s current gaming performance. So the synthetic analysis begins by taking a spin with 3DMark03 which is build around the DirectX 9.0 specifications, although still using quite some DirectX 8.1 features.

Benchmark Results - 1280x1024 - E6300 2.80GHz - 2GB RAM
	Radeon X1950 PRO 256MB	3DMark03 Score
0x AA/Optimal	575/1380MHz (Ref - Single)	13996
4x AA/16x AF	575/1380MHz (Ref - Single)	7889
	GeForce 8600 GTS 256MB	3DMark03 Score
0x AA/Optimal	675/2000MHz (Ref - Single)	14240
4x AA/16x AF	675/2000MHz (Ref - Single)	7758
Results Interpretation: Higher index values are better.

Looking at the results we pulled by using 3DMark03, it does show that both cards are very close in term of performance. While the GeForce 8600 GTS from Point of View does better at the default settings, it drops a bit faster behind when we enable the extra features such as antialiasing and anisotropic filtering. It does show that the GeForce 8600 GTS is up for the battle and has one major advantage which is the support of DirectX 10 technology. But it shows that the GeForce 8600 GTS is ready and can deliver the performance it needs to pull ahead. So once again a quite successful introduction of the GeForce 8600 series by NVIDIA with no real counterpart in terms features.