|
The following game were benched using the Bench 'Em All benchmarking utility. If you're not familiar with it go check it out, it's a handy utility that makes it much easier and faster to benchmark games. Again, all driver setting were left on high image quality and testing was performed in resolutions of 1024x768, 1280x1024, and 1600x1200 all in 32bit color and at a 75Hz refresh rate. It should be obvious that this card will eat up any game out there with ease and with all the eye candy turned on. As seen below, even the GPU dependent Doom3 benchmark ran at a fairly acceptable framerate at 1600x1200 resolution, all details maxed out. Halo benchmarks were composed of various cut-scene movies seen while playing the game and were all run using the Pixel Shader 2.0 support.
Counter Strike Source Stress Test:
**Note: CS:S was exited and restarted before every run to provide the most accurate results. There seem to be shader elements that do not handle the resolution/details switch very well. Try it out yourself, if you run the stress test in 1280x1024 resolution, after done, switch to 1024x768 and run the stress test again. You will notice purple hues throughout the surroundings. I do not know if this would affect actual framerates, however leaving nothing to chance, the game was restarted after every change.
Half Life 2 Information:
Now, to the part of this review you may find different than other reviews. I wanted to address the playability of HL2, the most anticipated and most sophisticated game released as of the writing of this review. Many people have been spending tons of money on the latest $500-$600 video card and upgrading their CPU and such, just to be able to play HL2. I myself just upgraded my motherboard, CPU and ram. HL2 is very dependent on a fast CPU/memory combination as well as a fast video card. Most people thought you would have to have the latest hardware just to be able to play. That's where they were wrong, well, sort of. I have myself been active in the Steam forums, paging through the vast threads asking, "Will HL2 run on my PC"? etc
etc
Nobody had a clear cut answer. Back in August of 2004 Valve made HL2 available for advance purchase via Steam, Valve's proprietary distribution system. Basically, you can find games, buy them, and download them all via the internet. That's right, no fancy box or manual or CD's to gawk at. Of course a broadband connection is highly recommended as some of these games run several gigabytes in size.
You definitely know that through SEO, your business will benefit hugely, so you have to make sure to find the right Link Building Company that can help you gain your goals SEO on lookup motor rankings, finding the best Link Building Company for your business is a lot more crucial than ever. Link building Company will help you | Simple Website Templates. Every great website and web design needs a starting place or point. Our own newly redesigned website started from a basic template that was heavily modified to suit our needs and the same can be done for you. Using our simple sea website templates on our site you can buy website templates The day Valve made HL2 available for pre-loading and pre-purchase I bought my virtual "copy". At that time another cult classic game was released, re-incarnated using the Source game engine. Counter Strike: Source. CS:S as we'll refer to it from now on also had a "Stress Test" which you could run to see how your system handled the Source engine, which is what HL2 is run on. The Stress Test was much easier on the system than actual gameplay however. You could expect to see your frames per second(fps) drop much lower when playing than they dropped in running the stress test. Now, I got to thinking. Back some months ago, Valve did a survey for current Steam customers. A HL2 hardware Survey they called it. They wanted you to let them see what hardware you are running and would be using that information to assist in the development of HL2. This sounded great to me, finally, a game company is going to try to make sure they don't release a game that is unable to be run on most pc's. Well, kind-of. Here are the hardware survey results. See for yourself. The GeForce4 MX series cards are right up there, making up over 10% of those surveyed, and they are Direct X 7 cards. Remember, HL2 is Direct X 9, although it is capable of running in DX7,8,or 9 if forced to, but that's not made clear up front. You have to search their forums to find out how to even make that work. As you browse through the results, you will see that a large majority of people are running systems that cannot even run previously released games at acceptable framerates and resolutions, let alone a DX9 game with advanced Havok physics and AI!!?? This to me seemed entirely irresponsible to make a game that they knew wouldn't run well on a large majority of pc's out there today. Of course, if they dumbed it down, it would not do justice for those folks who had purchased a 6800 Ultra Extreme for over $950.(yes, I did witness this first hand, held it myself)
So
..now that HL2 has been released and we've had a chance to play it, what can it do on a system such as our test system, with a <$250 video card? Let's find out.
HL2 Timedemo results:
HL2 timedemo benchmarks were conducted using Hard OCP's timedemo's. This way you can reference the performance of the high end cards they reviewed using the same timedemo's. Of course, keep in mind that all of my tests were done using 6x AA and 16x AF. For all HL2 timedemo benchmarks I ran it at 1024x768 32bit color, again, all driver settings to high image quality, no vsync, and AA set to 6x and AF set to 16x, as high as things can go, this way, you can know that these should be roughly the lowest scores you should see, given that you are using the same exact drivers, cpu, etc
.. This is the way the game was meant to be played.
- Demo1 results: 82.7fps
- Demo2 results: 78.7fps
Overclocking:
Running the same HL2 timedemo's, this time the 6600GT has been overclocked from the stock speeds of 500/1000 to 550/1100.
- Demo1 results: 84.02fps
- Demo2 results: 79.61fps
This card definitely has headroom to overclock, it ran 100% stable at these speeds running both HL2 timedemo's back to back. Another thing to keep in mind when overclocking anything is heat. The Nvidia drivers allow the 6600GT's temp to be monitored, at idle it runs about 36 degrees celcius. After running these two timedemo's back to back at these overclocked speeds, the high temp was only 40 degrees. With a threshold of 127 degrees celcius, one wonders how it would ever get that high. The ambient temperature in the room is 20 degrees celcius, that's 69 degrees farenheight, hardly freezing or otherwise, so this is a realistic measurement. I did manage to set the card to 600/1200, however, once stressed running HL2, it balked, couldn't handle it. I think for the overclocker, at least for this card equipped with this memory, a realistic overclock goal would be around 550Mhz Core and 1150Mhz Memory. Not bad though, you have to admit, a 100Mhz GPU oc and a 100Mhz memory oc isn't a small feat. As we can see above however, the gain provided by significantly higher clock speeds does not justify the risk involved in burning up your new video card now is it?
|
