The first game I tried on the 7600GS was Oblivion Knights of the Nine, the expansion pack to the best-selling RPG of 2006 on the PC and Xbox 360. Oblivion is one of the games that when I hear "Next Generation graphics" I immediately think of. The expansion pack adds new quests, new items, and new locations to an already massive game that lasted around 100+ hours. The 7600GS is designed for the mainstream market, with a price point of around $105 the level of performance that I expect from GIGABYTE is around the X1600XT level and met my expectations. The game was playable at Medium settings up to 1280x1024. The High Settings were almost totally unplayable outdoors and indoors was playable in towns.
Battlefield is a long-running series of games from Electronic Arts that started with Battefield 1942 a couple of years ago. The game is a squad based game where you try to capture enemy strong points. The Battlefield series has seen an almost yearly release regimen with the release of Battlefield Vietnam, Battlefield 2 and the release of Battlefield 2142 last year. The 7600GS is suited to play this game with framerates playable totally at 1280x1024 no AA no AF, and mostly playable at 1600x1200 with no AA no AF. Turning on AA caused the game to be unplayable unless the resolution was lowered to 1024x768.
In keeping with my tradition of playing the latest game demos on the latest video cards I installed Battlestrike the Road to Berlin. This game is much like an arcade gun simulator with the object of shooting down enemy aircraft either out of the door of an airplane or from a fixed gun emplacement. The graphics are frankly not up to the standards of Oblivion or other modern 3D games, but it is still a lot of fun to play. The game ran flawlessly on the 7600GT HDMI card, with solid and consistent framerates throughout.
As a big fan of Real-Time Strategy games like Warcraft and Command and Conquer over the years, I play every RTS game as soon as it is released, just like the RPG games. While the RTS game has generally not required a super graphics card like the 8800GTX or the upcoming R600 cards, Supreme Commander is an exception to the rule, as the minimum system requirements include a 128MB Pixel Shader 2.0 video card, and the recommended video card is a 6800 or better video card. The 7600GS HDMI card played it well with solid framerates.
Game screenshots
