NVIDIA had hoped that the new GeForce 7600GT could evolve into the successor of the 6600GT. The 7600GT has been designed to out perform even the GeForce 6800GS and it is a Radeon X1600XT killer. In order to make the new GeForce 7600GT as successful as the old 6600GT, NVIDIA will need to be tight with their pricing and they have been. The question many existing GeForce 6600GT owners are now asking is does it make sense to upgrade from the 6600GT to the 7600GT?

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 7600GT is faster than the old 6600GT and we have seen this in past reviews. However, what some readers want to know is how much faster is the new 7600GT and what games benefit from this added performance. Therefore, this article will look at the performance of both their NVIDIA based GPUs in new games like Quake 4, FEAR and X3. There will also be some older titles included such as UT2004 and Far Cry.

Already GeForce 7600GT cards can be purchased online for well under $200 US, in fact some cards are retailing for as low as $170 US. The original ASUS GeForce 6600GT card was reviewed here at Legion Hardware in December 2004 and at the time cost $230 US. When I reviewed the new ASUS GeForce 7600GT graphics card, it was currently retailing for just $190 US. Given the specifications of the 7600GT it should deliver exceptionally good performance and it does.

Just like the GeForce 6600GT the 7600GT utilizes a 128-bit memory bus and comes configured with 256MB of memory. However, the 7600GT has another 6.4GB/s of memory bandwidth at its disposal thanks to a number of factors, such as the higher core and memory clock frequencies. The core has been increased from the 500MHz of the 6600GT to 560MHz for the 7600GT. The memory frequency has also been boosted from 1GHz to 1.4GHz.

However, the most important improvements focus on the pipeline structure of the GeForce 7600GT. The GeForce 6600GT consisted of 3 vertex shaders 8 texture/fragment shader pipelines and 4 ROPs. The 7600GT on the other hand features 5 vertex shader units, 12 texture/fragment shader pipelines and 8 ROPs. This is what gives the 7600GT the majority of its extra grunt and will help it overcome graphics cards such as the Radeon X1600XT, X800XL and GeForce 6800GS.