I've recently updated my test suite to include three new benchmarks removing a few of the older ones. New to the test suite is Half Life 2 using two of the HardOCP benchmarks of full levels Canal and Coast, Doom 3 using the built in time demo, and 3DMark 2005. These benchmarks replace Quake 3, which is now over 5 years old, 3dmark 2001, over 4 years old, and SpecViewPerf, which is a professional applications benchmark, not suited for gaming.
Test System
- Pentium 4 3.4 GHz Extreme Edition
- 1 GB Crucial Ballistix DDR2 533 MHz memory
- 2x120 GB Seagate Barracuda V SATA HDDs in a RAID 0 array
- Foxconn 925X motherboard
- Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1
- DirectX 9.0c
- X800XT PCI Express video card running Catalyst 4.11
Tests
- 3dmark05
- 3dmark03
- UT2003
- Halo
- Gunmetal Benchmark 2
- Final Fantasy XI Benchmark 2
- Doom 3
- Half Life 2 Anandtech C17, Canal, Coast demos
- Serious Sam The Second Encounter Little Trouble Demo
- Aquamark 3
Performance is interesting on this card. Last year the mainstream $200 NVIDIA based 5900XT was the price/performance leader. Today, the performance of the 6600GT is above that of last year's fastest NVIDIA card, the 5950 Ultra. It's pretty amazing how far we've come in the 6 months since the release of the 5900XT PCI Express card. ATI has announced 3 different video cards in that price range, the x600XT, the X700 Pro and now the x800. NVIDIA has released the 5900XT and announced the 6600GT for this price range.
One note, I had to redo the benchmarks for Half Life 2 as the new 7 series engine for HL2 requires new time demos. Anandtech, one of the better web sites did series 7 timedemos that I used in this review.
