X-bit labs

GeForce 8 Streams to the Mainstream: Asus GeForce 8600 GTS Review (page 13)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko, Anton Shilov

[ 04/18/2007 | 06:08 AM ]

Half-Life 2: Episode One

Despite radical architectural differences, GeForce 8600 GTS doesn’t differ much from GeForce 7900 GS or Radeon X1950 Pro from the gaming prospective, as it offers the same level of performance. All three cards allow playing HL2: Episode One in resolutions up to 1600x1200 with maximum level of detail and enabled FSAA 4x. However, there is hardly any performance reserve in this case, so we would still recommend playing in resolutions no higher than 1280x1024.

Prey

As we have already said, new Nvidia architecture doesn’t yet perform as well in OpenGL applications as the older one. This is true for GeForce 8600 GTS, which falls behind GeForce 7900 GS throughout the entire test. In this case the situation gets even more aggravated by performance of TMUs: even though Nvidia declares 16 of them, the novelty even cannot match performance of the Radeon X1950 Pro with 12 TMUs at lower clock-speed.

As a result, the newcomer performed worst of all the testing participants, giving us no hope for acceptable performance even in 1280x1024 with enabled full-screen anti-aliasing, at least with current drivers.