NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT - AGP Version

HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: We tested the NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT on our trusted Asus P4P800 Deluxe i865PE chipset-based motherboard, powered by an Intel Pentium 4C CPU at 2.4GHz. The first thing we did when configuring this test system was enter the BIOS and loaded the "High Performance Defaults." Then we set the memory to operate at 200MHz in dual-channel mode, with the CAS Latency and other memory timings set by the SPD, and set the AGP aperture size to 256MB. The hard drive was formatted, and Windows XP Professional with SP1 was installed. When the installation was complete, we installed the latest Intel chipset drivers. Then we installed all of the necessary drivers for the rest of our components and removed Windows Messenger from the system.  Auto-Updating, System Restore, and Drive Indexing were then disabled, the hard drive was defragmented, and a 768MB permanent page file was created on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance," installed the benchmarking software, and ran all of the tests.

The HotHardware Test System Oldie, but still a goodie

Performance Comparisons With 3DMark05 Futuremark's Latest...but is it the greatest?

3DMark05

3DMark05 is the latest installment in a long line of synthetic 3D graphics benchmarks, dating back to late 1998.  3DMark99 came out in October 1998, and was followed by the very popular DirectX 7 benchmark, 3DMark2000, roughly two years later.  The DirectX 8.1 compliant 3DMark2001 was released shortly thereafter, and it too was a very popular tool used by many hardcore gamers.  3DMark03, however, wasn't quite as well received thanks in no small part to the dissapproval of graphics giant NVIDIA.  With 3DMark05 though, Futuremark hopes to win back some of their audience, with a very advanced DirectX 9 benchmarking tool.  We ran 3DMark05's default test (1024x768) on all of the cards we tested and have the overall results for you posted below...

In our first of many tests that we put the three cards through, the 6600 GT came away as the clear winner, outperforming the 9800 Pro by nearly 25%.  The GFFX 5900 XT with it's lower peak fill rate is the real victim here, unable to put up any kind of comparable numbers.

Performance Comparisons With Final Fantasy XI Benchmark 2 v1.01 A Classic Console Franchise On The PC

Final Fantasy XI

The Final Fantasy franchise is well known to console gamers, but Squaresoft has since made the jump to the PC with a MMORPG version of this classic. The Final Fantasy XI benchmark runs through multiple scenes from the game and displays a final score every time a full cycle of the demo is completed. Although the demo is meant to check an entire system's readiness to play the game, the number of frames rendered scales when different video cards are used. Lower scores indicate some frames were dropped to complete the demo in the allotted time. The scores below were taken with the demo set to its "High Resolution" option (1024x768) with anti-aliasing disabled.