Halo: Combat Evolved

Halo is a game of simple textures, but heavy pixel shaders. Benefiting by its advanced architecture and having eight pixel pipelines (against four in the other participants), the GeForce 6600 shows the best result. The overclocked Extreme AX600 XT is, however, quite close to it. The GPU frequency is important here, as it determines the speed of execution of pixel shaders.

Painkiller

The GeForce 6600 is better than the Extreme AX600 XT/HTVD in high resolutions. The latter performs better at higher frequencies, even winning in 1024x768 resolution. This game features a relatively complex geometry and various shader-based special effects. New graphics architectures have no problems with either, while RADEON X600-based graphics cards can only rely on their high clock rates.

It’s only through overclocking that the Extreme AX600 XT/HTVD can be competitive against the GeForce 6600 in the eye candy mode.