Bringing Competition to Midrange: The GeForce 9600 GT Raises NVIDIA's Sub $200 Bar
by Derek Wilson on February 21, 2008 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Performance
Version: 1.4
Settings: Everything maxed out without AA. Soft particles enabled
on DX10 class hardware.
For this benchmark, we created a new timedemo based on multiplayer action in the island level. Our old timedemo no longer works after the 1.4 update. This timedemo is about 10000 frames long and covers a lot of ground so many aspects of gameplay are incorporated. We run it with the timenetdemo and take the output. This is our only OpenGL benchmark.
The NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT out paces its competition in this benchmark. OpenGL has long been a strong suit for NVIDIA, but AMD has made some gains in this area with their current generation of cards. It isn't enough this time around to put AMD on top with the NVIDIA hardware clearly leading. Of course, it's also hard to miss the abysmal performance of the 8800 GT 256MB card here. Clearly in a situation where the memory size is not an issue it can shine (1280x1024), but performance drops to half or less that of the 9600 GT when pushed higher.
Either NVIDIA really needs to start optimizing for lower memory situations, or it should just not make parts like this. Hopefully we won't see 256MB 9600 GT parts with similar characteristics.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
49 Comments
View All Comments
dm0r - Thursday, February 21, 2008 - link
Ca we say the best midrange nvidia card ever?Good review.Ill keep tunned for more testing.I also would like to see the 256MB variant.Thanks
kmmatney - Thursday, February 21, 2008 - link
No, I don't think you can say best mid-range card ever. The past year has been so bad, it just makes this look like a good deal. This is what the mid-rnage should have always been like. Some better mid-range cards in the pastBetter mid-range cards that I've owned in the past
Voodoo3 1000 - $45 card, performed better than $100 cards at the time
Ti4200 - $120, very overclockable
Radeon LE - $65 - bios update to perform like a $165 card
6600GT - defacto mid-range card for a long time
Radeon X800GTO2 - Bios update to 16 pipes, X850XT PE speeds
There are others, these are just very good mid-range cards that I've owned, that I would say offered the same or better bang-for-buck as the 9600GT.
BigLan - Thursday, February 21, 2008 - link
The 6600 was a great card for it's time, and further back than that the 4200ti was incredible - though you could argue that it wasn't technically mid-range.dm0r - Thursday, February 21, 2008 - link
oh, forgot to mention the temperature testsknitecrow - Thursday, February 21, 2008 - link
It is a good preview but I would like to see more in depth benchmarking, esp. with titles like Gears Of War, and BioshockSpivonious - Thursday, February 21, 2008 - link
Is the 3850 included in the benchmarks at 256MB or 512MB?hadifa - Thursday, February 21, 2008 - link
Tomshardware has done some tests with the 512MB versionImSpartacus - Saturday, February 23, 2008 - link
I don't know why anyone bothers with the 256mb version anymore. The 512mb is cheap as dirt and does wonders on those higher resolutions.I was planning on getting one, but this 9600gt is looking a little better.
Spivonious - Thursday, February 21, 2008 - link
Nevermind, I read the whole last page now :)