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Albatron GeForce 6600 - 512 Performance To measure the Albatron GeForce 6600 - 512's performance we have a suite of real world gameplay set up. Selecting several of our favorite games, we played several sequences and measured the frame rates with a sampling every second using FRAPS. This being done to give you an idea of what type of gameplay the card brings to the table rather than just an average rote score. The sequences we selected are runs in which I can TRY and duplicate gameplay actions as much as possible so a vague comparison can be made between several products. Our comparison card today logically enough is a 6600 GT; an Albatron GeForce 6600 GT to be exact. The 6600 GT uses DDR III memory with a higher core and memory speed (500MHz / 1010MHz DDRIII). Yet, it also has only a quarter of the memory of our review card - a mere 128 MB. By selecting this specific card for comparison we can get a rough idea of can loads of memory make that much of a difference? Keep in mind though that the 6600GT uses the MUCH faster DDR III over the DDR2 in our review card. The games we selected are Battlefield 2, Need For Speed: Most Wanted, Half Life 2, Quake 4 and Doom 3. The last two games have the well known warning message citing that their "Ultra" settings are designed to operate with 512MB of texture memory. This should prove interesting using a card with 512 MB of memory on it. Since these are midrange cards, resolution will be set to 1024 x 768 with eye candy maxed out but not to exceed 4x FSAA and 8x Anioscopic Filtering. Each graph will have its respective settings outlined. Test Bed
Results First up is my favorite, Battlefield 2. Large fields, fast vehicles and lots of action make this an excellent way to get a handle on a card's performance. Using the Zatar Wetlands map in single player with everything maxed and FSAA set to 4x here's what we found.
Yikes. This was a surprise. I had
fallen into the trap of thinking what a difference doubling the system memory
made therefore my logic was beforehand that any VGA memory increases would
also help. I was mistaken. Gameplay was playable but an occasional
stutter took a bit away from things. You can see how the frame rate
hovers at the 30 fps mark. The human eye can't detect anything faster
than 30 frames per second but there were several instances where we dropped
below that here.
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