NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS and 8600 GT

Name: NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS and 8600 GT - Page 8
Brand: NVIDIA

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, April 17, 2007, 10:00 AM EDT

Performance Comparisons with Half-Life 2: Episode 1

Details: www.half-life2.com/

Half Life 2:
Episode 1

Thanks to the dedication of hardcore PC gamers and a huge mod-community, the original Half-Life became one of the most successful first person shooters of all time. And thanks to an updated game engine, gorgeous visual, and intelligent weapong and level design, Half Life 2 became almost as popular. Armed with the latest episodic update to HL2, Episode 1, we benchmarked the game with a long, custom-recorded timedemo that takes us through both outdoor and indoor environments. These tests were run at resolutions of 1,280 x 1,024 and 1,600 x 1,200 with 4X anti-aliasing and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently, and with color correction and HDR rendering enabled in the game engine as well.

Our custom Half Life 2: Episode 1 benchmark proved to be a bit of a stumbling clock for the GeForce 8600 GTS and GT cards. In this test, the cards put up playable framerates at 1280x1024 with AA and aniso enabled, but performance fell off quite a bit at the higher resolution. Overall, they were outpaced by all of the competition in this game, including the GeForce 7950 GT and the Radeon X1950 Pro.

Tags: Nvidia, GeForce, GTS, 860, force, GT, id, and

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com