X-bit labs

Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT: Worthy Rival to ATI Radeon HD 3000 (page 11)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 03/07/2008 | 10:33 AM ]

Crysis

The game being too hard at its Very High level of detail, we benchmarked the cards without FSAA to get a more playable speed.

A new-generation game, Crysis puts a high load on the graphics card’s computing units. The Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT, with only 64 such units, cannot compete with the G92- and RV670-based products, including the ATI Radeon HD 3850. Anyway, a below-$200 graphics card is not actually meant for running Crysis at the highest graphics quality settings because top-end cards cannot cope with that job even.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

The frame rate is fixed at 30fps in this game as this is the rate at which the physical model is being updated at the server. Thus, this 30fps speed is the required minimum for playing the game.

The new card has a good start, being only 14-15% inferior to the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT 512MB and delivering comfortable performance, but at 1600x1200 it slows down to the level of the ATI Radeon HD 3850 although ATI’s solutions have never been fast in OpenGL applications. It’s hard to explain this behavior, but it must be due to a lack of execution units because the GeForce 9600 GT has enough of graphics memory and enough of memory bandwidth. Its texture-mapping performance shouldn’t be far inferior to that of the ATI Radeon HD 3850/3870, either.