8600 Preliminary benchies, kinda weak...

Great find. I guess the real tell will be the price that Nvidia pitch them at.

Initially though, it looks like the X1600 looked upon first release, i.e. too large a gap between itself and the current top-end offering.

What are you talking about outperforming the X1950XT, the GF8600GTS overclocked basically kept pace with or lost to the X1950PRO, which is where most of us expected it to perform in actual games. Once again proving, 3Dmark is good for exposing features, but tells you little about overall performance in games. That's why those early leaks would've meant more if they posted the smaller individual SM2.0, 3.0, etc test results, not just the final score.

So the X1950 pro sels for about $150, they're really gonna need to start showing off some DX10 app/benefits for these new mid-range cards to start earning their high price tags.

I agree with Abyss, this is just like the X1600 series. Nice new features, but for current games better off with the previous generation's crippled high end.

I only took a glimpse, my bad, but the 7950gt was killed by it to give nvidia some credit

But I too really thought nvidia was going to release a good product with the 8600 utlra, I think ati's midrange will perform far better

Yeah I wonder about that, I don't think the X2600 can perform much better than that with it still being memory limited.

I suspect the X2600 will be +/- 5-10% performance compared to the GF8600 series, and both will dissapoint those expecting to put an X1950XTX in thei SFF case running on a 250W power supply like they had with their GF7600GT which kept pace with many of the old guards like the GF6800GT.

I just hope that they do well with the notebook versions, because despite the weak by desktop standards numbers we see here, if the X2600 can match them, and give me duallink HDMI out with audio, then I think I have my perfect solution for my laptop. Low res gaming in Crysis and UT3 (with most features turned on), and full res Oblivion, and true flesh tone pr0n with Dolby TrueHD sound. That's good enough for me.

PS, yeah I just bought the NIN HD-DVD last week with TrueHD, and OMG, I'm hooked, just as good as DVD-Audio, so I am amped that it will be supporting it with the RealTek audio device.

Tell me about it, I was really hoping the 8600 ultra would be a 7800gtx competitor or better than it, but at least it's better than the 7950gt (not surprising), so one thing we know for sure, nvidia's mid range gpus suck compared to ati's

Well, I said 7800gtx because the 7600gt was on par with the 6800gt, I thought it being on par with the 7900gtx would be a lot to ask of nvidia, but then again, Moore's law

Huh? We've seen some pretty amazing ocs, those were average imo, and even still, it got demolished by a stock 8800gts, just proving once again it's all about the unified processors, and the gts and gtx having 96 and 128 respectively, are always going to beat out a card with less even if that card clocks far higher, I've seen a 7600gt be clocked as high as 750 on the core using watercooling (xfx model) and that still would die if you compared it to a stock gts

D'you think these benches are reliable? Didn't think an X1950XT was anywhere near as good as an 8800gts, but here it either keeps up or outperforms it....?

Man, that card sux balls, it just barely surpasses the 7900gt, so we know the other benchmarks were correct now

So basically, my opinion would be: If you're not buying a 8800GTS/X, go with ATI.

Is that correct? I mean, a $110 X1950GT can perform equally to this.

Indeed, but the GT overclocks to Pro+ speeds easily.

But the gt doesn't have as many pipelines as the xt (I don't remember if the pro does or not, don't believe it does either)

good to see you bro, agreed that the 8600's performance is disappointing, but have you ever thought of getting faster hdd instead to remove the hdd bottleneck? If you're willing to put up with used parts, ebay has a ton of cheap 15k scsi drives, something I'm seriously looking into, I don't want to pay $200 for a small raptor when there's something else that can kill it and it's just a bit used

Right now im seriously considering dumping all of Snowman-PC's budget into upgrading my main pc. Cheetah drives are dirt cheap on eBay, and if I set up 4 or 5 of 'em in RAID I could have an extremely fast HDD setup. The main problem is getting an SCSI hdd controller card so I could actually use them, all of the ones i've looked that are suitable for my needs are really expensive.

I say dump the snowman, get faster cheetah drives, I found the controllers on ebay for cheap too, for the raid, I wouldn't do raid 1 on all four, I'd do either raid 5 or 1+0 (what exactly does raid 5 give besides stability?), but I call dibs on the 68pin scsi drives

Yeah, I think the 128bit slowed it down considerably, especially since it was 36 pipelines vs my 6600gt's 8 or the 7600gt's 12, so you'd expect a huge improvement especially when the 7900gt has something like 24pipelines

What I;m wondering is will ati release an x2800 to have an 8800gtx competitor, or will they release an x3000 down to road to compete with the 8900gtx officially? If the x2600 is like the 7600gt to the 6800gt, then I really want to know what it can do, but seeing how much of a flop th e8600 ultra is going to be, my guess is ati will sit there and laugh, just barely crank it over the 8600ultra's performance and price it a tad lower (due to the 65nm) and then amd will finally start making some money 8O

It wouldn't be X3000 (beyond the obvious intel issues), but the X2900 and X2950, and then X3800/3900/etc once the R700 comes.

Well unfortunately I think the X2600 is in the same boat and will be memory limited. I suspect if anything it'll be +/- 5% from the GF8600GTS. The only thing that could save it s expensive exotic highest speed GDDR4 memory, and that defeats the purpose of going with 128bit.

Yeah they may be cheaper to make, but they still need them to be attractive, so price alone might not be good enough, they really need to be seen as equals. And with the added features like the realtek audio chip, the price difference is likely minimal. Even without that, the RV series likely won't be significantly cheaper to allow a price war, only that if they doe sell for the same price, AMD's margins should be better per card.

I don't doubt dual GPU is possible (I mean for the R600 just to clear that up, not in general obviously), but IMO why bother when you can do Xfire. Just start enabling Quad+ Xfire.

I dont know why Terry et al aren't embracing it since they hyped up the potential with Supetitling, etc. Sounds like they are having dificulties getting it ready for prime time, but IMO dual chip cards have a limited market, and end up very big, very costly (to build), compared to 2 single cards.

Just think of the size of card and layers required to support 2 R600s with their 512bit memory. It's completely insane. Doesn't mean someone won't do it, but like most of those solutions, they're more experiments in 'proof of concept' than practical solutions.

Yeah, nvidia is having tons of driver problems because they didn't design their cards to work with all the vista specifications while amd is claiming they have, so you may want to consider the x2600 because of driver issues

Even still, ati cards have almost always outperformed nvidia's, the amd of gfx cards (kinda ironic how ati actually is amd, and amd used to kill intel with prices for their performance), so I think you should go that route, or take a look at the r600 after the x2950xtx comes out and drops the r600 in price

Cool, kinda sad how people here are throwing x1950xtxs and 7900gtxs aside and even essentially throwing them into computers they'll never see again and I'm running a 6600gt though

Ohh well, I'm more concerned with games like halo really and just want a nice monitor over a gfx card

should i get a 7900gs now before they replace them w/ the 8600GTS that will cost more and perform the same?

right now its 140 and i can OC it heavily w/ a vf900.

Should have better drivers than an early 8600gts right? Since its gonna be cheaper, same power, good choice?

u might as well wait for the faster and cheaper radeon 2600 XT

will smack down the 8600gts from what i can tell

hell it might smack up the 8800 GTS 320

yea, but i want to buy in like 2 weeks.

also, wont the 7900gs be better in the sense that there is much more experience with it, its been out for longer, and more issues have been ironed out