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Nvidia has recently released the new GeForce 8600 GT which is designed to be the successor of the 7600 GT. In fact the 8600 GT is the third instalment of a successful x600 GT series from Nvidia, which they have been building for the past three years. The series all began with the 6600 GT, a $200 US graphics card that produced performance that could almost rival high-end parts. Armed with a 500MHz 8-pixel pipeline core and 900MHz GDDR3 memory utilizing a 128-bit memory bus, the 6600 GT was a force to be reckoned with.  Over a year later the 7600 GT surfaced with a 560MHz 12-pixel pipeline core along with 256MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 1400MHz. This saw the available memory bandwidth increase from 14.4GB/s to 22.4GB/s. In many cases the 7600 GT was found to be twice as fast as the older 6600 GT and more importantly, the 7600 GT was faster than everything else in the $200 US price range upon release. Now we have the new GeForce 8600 GT which features some interesting specifications when compared to the older 7600 GT. The question many GeForce 7600 GT owners are now asking is does it make sense to upgrade from the 7600 GT to the 8600 GT? In other words, are the performance gains enough to justify the upgrade? This is a question I will look to answer in this article. Of course the GeForce 8600 GT is faster than the old 7600 GT and we have seen this in past reviews. However, what some readers want to know is how much faster is the new 8600 GT and what games benefit from this added performance? Therefore, this article will look at the performance of both their Nvidia based GPUs in a number of new and old gaming titles. Just like the GeForce 6600 GT and 7600 GT graphics cards, the new 8600 GT utilizes a 128-bit memory bus and comes configured with 256MB of memory. This is interesting as not a lot has changed here and despite featuring GDDR3 memory clocked at 1400MHz, the 8600 GT only boasts a memory bandwidth of 22.4GB/s, equal to that of the 7600 GT. Shockingly the core has been decreased from the 560MHz of the 7600 GT, to just 540MHz for the 8600 GT. However, the most important improvements focus on the pipeline structure of the GeForce 8600GT. The GeForce 6600GT consisted of 3 vertex shaders, 8 texture/fragment shader pipelines, and 4 ROPs. The 7600GT on the other hand featured 5 vertex shader units, 12 texture/fragment shader pipelines, and 8 ROPs. The GeForce 8 series brings a shift in GPU functionality and capability, moving away from the traditional pixel and vertex shaders we had got familiar with. We now have a collection of floating point processors, also called Stream Processor Units (SPUs). The 8800 GTX utilized 128 SPUs clocked at 1.35GHz. Then we have TAUs (Texture Address Units) of which the 8800 GTX features 32, along with 24 ROPs (Rasterization Operator Units). The 8600 GT on the other hand features just 32 SPUs which operate at 1.18GHz. This is then backed up by 16 TAUs and 8 ROPs. This means the 8600 GT has roughly four times less processing power than the 8800 GTX. This interesting fact becomes a little more shocking when you realize that the 7600 GT had half the processing power of the 7900 GTX. The GeForce 8800 GTX set such an unbeatable pace and for the 8600 GT to be half as fast it would be an exceptional product. The problem is everyone was not only hoping, but expecting, the 8600 GT to be half as fast as the 8800 GTX, but with a quarter of the processing power, how can it be? |
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