Asus N6600GT AGP

Review Pages

1. Introduction
2. Features-TurboCache
3. A closer look
4. Test System
5. 3DMark05
6. 3DMark 2003
7. Codecreatures
8. Aquamark3 / 3DMark 2001
9. Half life 2
10. Doom 3
11. Far Cry
12. Thief 3
13. Colin McRae 05
14. Ground Control II
15. Overclocking
16. Conclusion

3D Mark is a widely used and accepted benchmark that stresses the DirectX performance of a VGA card. A very strong point of 3DMark is that it's VGA card measuring is does not require any CPU power. So the resulting fps are a good reference a VGA card's rendering performance. For testing the performance of each card we used the 4 game benchmarks 3DMark has.

3Dmark03 also includes sound and CPU tests as well as some other feature tests.

- Game Test 1 - Wings of Fury (DX7)

This test is a combat flight simulator written for older hardware (DirectX 7). Particles are used a lot in this test - smoke and vapor trails, flak and gunfire, and explosions are produced using point sprites and quads.

- Game Test 2 - Battle of Proxycon (DX8)

This test is a simulation of first person shooter game types. 1.1 and 1.4 Vertex shaders are widely used since all character models are skinned using vertex shaders.This makes this test a good vertex shader comparison for VGA cards.

- Game Test 3 - Trolls' Lair (DX8)

This test should be the favorite of all RPG lovers. It is a cut scene of a female warrior facing two malicious trolls. Again the same vertex and pixel processing is used as in game test 2.

This test also uses post-processing effects, such as Depth of Field and Bloom effects which are widely used in today's game cut scene sequences.

- Game Test 4 - Mother Nature (DX9)

Mother nature represents the level of effects and realism that are possible using 2.0 vertex and pixel shaders, plus some other features that DirectX 9 offers.

In the DirectX 7 based GT1, the Asus N6600GT produced an over-the-top 254fps, 24 fps more than its relative from MSI. Moving on to the last three games, surprisingly the difference is still there ranging from 5 to 7fps. The X800XT is once again incomparable and showing off its power against the mid-end 6600GTs.

- 3DMark Official score

If you test your machine with 3DMark, you can post the results at 3DMark's online result browser. For more information visit futuremark.com.

It is really amazing what a new set of memory and different clock speeds can bring in performance. The N6600GT was able to outperform the 6600GT from MSI by a total of 900 3DMarks!