For some time now ATI and nVidia have engaged in the type of performance war that Intel and Advanced Micro Devices once waged. Every three to six months one company rolls out a new super-high-end chip in an effort to win the speed crown and bragging rights.
Unfortunately, those chips ultimately end up on high-end graphics boards that can cost anywhere from $500 to $750--double that if you're crazy enough to put them into a dual-card SLI or CrossFire rig. So while we all enjoy reading the stories about how well they test, few of us will ever actually own one of them.
Thankfully, every now and again ATI or nVidia introduce a new chip for those of us who would end up in the proverbial dog house should we ever bring home a $750 graphics card. On March 9, nVidia announced the GeForce 7600 GT, which is now appearing on boards that sell for $179 to $229.
Why the pricing spread? Most vendors are offering multiple flavors of the 7600 GT, based on the actual clock speed of the graphics processing unit. For example, XFX will sell a 570-MHz version for $200, a 580-MHz version for $210, and a 590-MHz version for $220. All of the XFX cards include 256MB of RAM.
We tested the new chip on a reference board from nVidia running at its standard 560-MHz clock speed--and let me tell you, friends, that board is sweet.
New Tech, Better Performance
The new 7600 GT chip and its pricier brethren, the 7900 GTX and 7900 GT, are all products of nVidia's relatively new 90-nanometer manufacturing process. The chips that these three new GPUs are replacing (the 7800 GTX, 7800 GT, and 6800 GS) were based on the company's older 110-nanometer process. The new process lets nVidia create faster, smaller, more efficient chips.
Beyond the new process, another interesting aspect of the 7600 GT is that it brings features from nVidia's 7 series chips into the mainstream price category. Before this release, if you bought an nVidia card for less than $200, you were getting a product from the very capable but aging 6 series.
One Fast Chip
We pitted our 7600 GT reference card against two existing retail competitors. The first, eVGA's e-Geforce 6800 GS, uses the chip that the 7600 GT most directly replaces and includes 256MB of memory. The second, PowerColor's Radeon X1600 XT Bravo Edition with 256MB of memory, uses ATI's competing X1600 XT chip. (ATI just announced the new X1800 GTO, which is supposed to appear on $250 boards designed to compete against the 7600 GT, but at this writing we haven't seen a board based on ATI's chip.)
nVidia's 7600 GT dominated most of our tests. At our highest resolution (1600 by 1200), with antialiasing turned off, the card won every single one of our eight game-based tests, often by a notable margin. For example, in our Battlefield 2 test the 7600 GT notched 55 frames per second, while the 6800 GT reached 42 fps and the X1600 XT hit 34 fps.
In tests performed at the same resolution, with antialiasing turned on, the 7600 GT again performed well, posting winning frame rates in five of the eight games. It lost by a single frame to the 6800 GS in Unreal Tournament 2004, and posted ties with the 6800 GS in Splinter Cell Chaos Theory and Far Cry. Meanwhile, the X1600 XT generally trailed by a perceptible margin.
Tests performed at 1024 by 768 yielded largely similar results. With antialiasing turned on, the 7600 GT nearly swept the field, posting wins in every game except in Unreal Tournament, where the 6800 GS won by a single frame, and in Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, where the 7600 GT and 6800 GS tied (with the X1600 XT trailing by a sizeable margin). At that same resolution, with antialiasing turned off, the 7600 GT card again won the majority of our tests. The only exceptions were Unreal Tournament 2004, where the 7600 GT again lost by a single frame to the 6800 GS, and Far Cry, where the two cards tied.
So that's basically a long and geeky way to say that the 7600 GT looks like the real deal. I'm not sure I like the various MHz-flavored-retail boards--an extra $10 for an extra 10 MHz seems kind of cheesy to me--but that won't stop me from recommending a card based on this chip.
Let the other guy spend upwards of $600 on the priciest graphics card on the planet--and incur wrath at home. I'd rather get a 7600 GT and sleep in my own bed.
On second thought, Tom Mainelli would consider paying an extra $10 if he could get himself an extra 10 MHz. Write him an e-mail.
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