X-bit labs

Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT: Worthy Rival to ATI Radeon HD 3000 (page 9)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko

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

Performance in First-Person 3D Shooters

Battlefield 2142

This game doesn’t support display resolutions of 16:10 format, so we use a resolution of 1920x1440 pixels (4:3 format) instead of 1920x1200 for it.

That’s an impressive start: the Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT is not only ahead of the ATI Radeon HD 3870 but also very close to the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB despite having 48 shader processors and 12 (24) TMUs less! Let’s see what we have in more complex and demanding tests, though.

BioShock

BioShock doesn’t support FSAA when running in Windows Vista’s DirectX 10 environment. That’s why we benchmarked the cards without FSAA.

The new card cannot repeat the triumph in BioShock as this game uses an advanced engine and DirectX 10 based special effects that call for serious computing capacities. Anyway, the Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT is no worse than the ATI Radeon HD 3870 at 1280x1024 and much better than it at 1600x1200/1680x1050. It is only at 1920x1200 that the lower memory bandwidth shows up, yet the 9600 GT is a mere 6-7% behind the AMD card in that case, too. The performance of the new card from Nvidia is comfortable enough except for the highest tested resolution.