Recommended video cards

[SavageX]

Or get a 7600 GS - fast, cool, cheap.

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php ... &card2=387

[Ed]

Or get a 7600 GS - fast, cool, cheap.

Not out on AGP yet. Due in July. The first passively cooled one in Britain has my name on it.

[:)]

[Ed]

Or of course you could get the old faithful and best graphics card in the world ever, the 6600GT as Dave has pointed out. But why does it say Ed on it?

[Gut_Eater]

Finally i ordered the 6600GT because i think, that it is the better choice.
Thx for your help.

Cya

[:)]

[PHREAK]

Or of course you could get the old faithful and best graphics card in the world ever, the 6600GT as Dave has pointed out. But why does it say Ed on it?

Might be one of the best, but I still prefer the 6800 if you can get your hands on it.

[Ed]

I still prefer the 6800

The 6800 non-GT/Ultra wasn't that great a card. Not bad but not as good as the rest of the 6xxx line. It may be faster than a 6600GT in some tests but there are times when it may be slower. In a gedanken experiment where a single pixel operation must be processed a 6600GT will beat the 6800 due to higher clockspeeds. In fact, the first nVIDIA card to beat the 6600GT in this experiment is the 7800GTX 512 as it was the first nVIDIA card to have a higher clockspeed. This gedanken experiment does not take into account multiple pipelines but they sometimes make no difference.

Also it does not have quite as many video encoding/decoding features as the 6600GT. This is because it was the older NV40 architecture. Even the 6200 has better video features than the 6800 Ultra because of this.

In addition, the 6800 is made on the older 130nm process. The 6600GT is made at 110nm so the chip uses less power (this is important), runs cooler and doesn't need such a big, noisey cooler to cool it. The cards physical dimensions are also smaller. In summary, the 6800 suffers from all of the high end disadvantages. The 6600GT does not.

Some people may argue that you can unlock pipelines on the 6800. You can but it won't help you because the memory forms a bottleneck. It only runs DDR whereas the 6600GT runs DDR3.

Although the two were priced quite similarly and perform quite similarly, only one of them is the best selling graphics card ever. The other wasn't that successful.

[Urmel]

Well, 6800 is a great one fo gaming, but try to get one for AGP Bus

[LordHavoc]

The 6800 non-GT/Ultra wasn't that great a card. Not bad but not as good as the rest of the 6xxx line. It may be faster than a 6600GT in some tests but there are times when it may be slower. In a gedanken experiment where a single pixel operation must be processed a 6600GT will beat the 6800 due to higher clockspeeds. In fact, the first nVIDIA card to beat the 6600GT in this experiment is the 7800GTX 512 as it was the first nVIDIA card to have a higher clockspeed. This gedanken experiment does not take into account multiple pipelines but they sometimes make no difference.

Nexuiz 1.6 uses pixel shaders very heavily on the walls, the average number of operations per pixel per pass is more than 10 (and goes up if you turn on offsetmapping which adds around 8 operations, or reliefmapping which adds around 40 operations, NOTE: these are estimates, I haven't recently checked the number of operations using the nvidia shader performance utility), so higher number of pipelines or higher core clock matters a lot more than memory speed.

Stencil shadows are still core clock/memory bound however, so turning on realtime world lights will benefit more from higher core clock or faster memory than from shader performance.

Some people may argue that you can unlock pipelines on the 6800. You can but it won't help you because the memory forms a bottleneck. It only runs DDR whereas the 6600GT runs DDR3.

It may help in Nexuiz 1.6.