Soldato
- Joined
- 22 Mar 2007
- Posts
- 3,875
A leading online games website (not sure if I can name it here, doubt it classes as a competitor but don't want to risk it) has given their verdict on the 8600GTS, GT and 8500GT, and its not good:
"The GeForce 8600 GTS and the GeForce 8600 GT wowed and disappointed us at the same time. Performance in shader intensive games like Oblivion was impressive; however neither of the cards offers performance gains over what you can already purchase in the sub-$200 category. More often than not, the 8600s lag behind the GeForce 7900 GS, the Radeon X1950 Pro, and especially the Radeon X1900 XT. The allure of DirectX 10 support might count for something, but we're not prepared to give Nvidia credit until we see how these cards actually perform with DirectX 10 games. For the moment, we'd pass on the GeForce 8600 GTS and the GeForce 8600 GT in favor of similarly priced higher-performance DirectX 9 cards. If you’re willing to spend a little more, the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB provides vastly superior performance."
On top of this, they had benchmarks in which the 8800 GTS 320MB got double the score of the 8600GTS! For example, on Company of Heroes at 2048x1536 at high quality, the 8800GTS 320Mb got 59fps, compared to 23fps from the 8600GTS, which was beaten by the X1900XT, X1950 Pro and 7900GS!
So message here is steer clear of them, get the 8800 instead!
"The GeForce 8600 GTS and the GeForce 8600 GT wowed and disappointed us at the same time. Performance in shader intensive games like Oblivion was impressive; however neither of the cards offers performance gains over what you can already purchase in the sub-$200 category. More often than not, the 8600s lag behind the GeForce 7900 GS, the Radeon X1950 Pro, and especially the Radeon X1900 XT. The allure of DirectX 10 support might count for something, but we're not prepared to give Nvidia credit until we see how these cards actually perform with DirectX 10 games. For the moment, we'd pass on the GeForce 8600 GTS and the GeForce 8600 GT in favor of similarly priced higher-performance DirectX 9 cards. If you’re willing to spend a little more, the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB provides vastly superior performance."
On top of this, they had benchmarks in which the 8800 GTS 320MB got double the score of the 8600GTS! For example, on Company of Heroes at 2048x1536 at high quality, the 8800GTS 320Mb got 59fps, compared to 23fps from the 8600GTS, which was beaten by the X1900XT, X1950 Pro and 7900GS!
So message here is steer clear of them, get the 8800 instead!
