8600 GT/GTS Follow-up Performance

Final Words

With the past few generations of midrange $150 cards, we've come to expect that current games could more or less be played with maximum settings at lower mainstream resolutions. This is somewhat the case with the 8600 series. With some of the titles we tested, we had to dial down the settings a bit more to get a smooth experience at 1280x1024. Taken on its own, this isn't a major issue.

The new G84 based midrange solutions offer DX10, which no other midrange hardware currently supports. We also get better video decode performance with 100% decode acceleration of H.264 video. If this was where the story ended, we would be quite happy with the new hardware from NVIDIA, but there is a larger context to consider.

NVIDIA's GeForce 8600 GTS and GT simply do not perform any better than similarly priced hardware from AMD. GeForce 7 Series hardware priced at $150 and $200 also performs similarly to G84 based parts, outperforming the newcomer in some games and tying or trailing in others. Certainly NVIDIA can determine the value of their hardware as they see fit, and they have a good argument for pricing the 8600 series. Other hardware at the $150 and $200 price points perform similarly, so their new hardware is mostly worth the price.

The problem is that there is a huge performance gap between the 8600 GTS and the 8800 GTS 320MB. We also have multiple cases where NVIDIA's new offerings perform lower than similarly priced hardware from their own previous generation hardware. In almost every case, AMD's X1900 XT 256MB beats out the 8600 GTS. While this hardware is certainly being phased out, it is still available and offers much better price/performance.

The bottom line is that the 8600 really doesn't offer what we would expect from a next generation midrange part. While on its own the 8600 series is not bad hardware, NVIDIA needs to rely on more than its feature set to sell its product. This is especially true when DX10 games are not abundant and fairly few people are even running an operating system which supports DX10.

The GeForce 6600 GT outperformed the Radeon 9800 Pro in virtually every benchmark, sometimes by large margins. It managed this with prices that were at the time quite a bit lower than the previous generation's champ. GeForce 7600 GT was also typically faster than GeForce 6800 GT/GS, and it once again came with a lower price tag. The 8600 hardware on the other hand doesn't appear significantly faster or cheaper than the cards it's replacing..

Even if we can't expect new hardware at a particular price point to blow away the competition, we would at least like to see a consistently better performance than similarly priced previous generation hardware. Our follow up benchmarks confirm that we simply don't get this from the 8600 series. For users who want the highest performance for their money, the 8600 series is not the answer. If you can live without full H.264 decoding support and you still want DirectX 10, the 8800 GTS 320 is currently so much faster than the 8600 GTS that we would recommend spending the extra ~$75.

At the same time, we wouldn't recommend against the 8600 series, as it does provide best in class video decode performance that will enable more computer owners to experience HD content without dropping frames. While DX10 software isn't really available yet, we can't ignore the fact that this hardware does support DX10. Whether or not it will achieve acceptable frame rates with DX10 software remains to be seen, but if DX10 games turn out similar to Oblivion and R6: Vegas, there's still hope. Performance isn't low enough on the 8600 hardware to completely pan the product, but we are at present unimpressed.