X-bit labs

Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT: Worthy Rival to ATI Radeon HD 3000 (page 16)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko

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

Performance in Strategies

Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts

The new add-on to Company of Heroes is tested in DirectX 10 mode only since it provides the highest quality of the visuals.

Games that make use of the advanced DirectX 10 capabilities but do not have optimizations for the superscalar Radeon HD architecture illustrate our point about the identical computing power of the Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT and ATI Radeon HD 3870. We see the same in this add-on to Company of Heroes. Moreover, the AMD card has a lower minimum of speed, probably due to its texture processor architecture with fewer texture filter units.

Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars

The game having a frame rate limiter, you should consider the minimum speed of the cards in the first place.

The Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT looks preferable to the GeForce 8800 GT 256MB, like in most other games. It means that as soon as the G94-based card hit the market in mass quantities, the G92-based solution will become obsolete. This is also the result of the inefficient memory management of Nvidia’s cards.

World in Conflict

As opposed to its performance in other DirectX 10 games, the ATI Radeon HD 3870 fails this test completely, which makes the Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT the leader in its class. The new card delivers the same performance as the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB at resolutions up to 1600x1200/1680x1050 pixels, being a very appealing buy. You’ll have to disable FSAA and, probably, lower the level of detail to play the game comfortably, though.