Chaintech SA6600G Video Card Review - Call of Duty, Doom3
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Call Of Duty
For this first benchmark, both cards ended up being set up somewhat similarly. The 6600GT was at 1280x1024 4xAA 8xAF, while the elderly Radeon 8500 pumped out pixels to 1024x768 3xAA 8xAF. While the 6600GT is not only a flat out faster card in terms of straight pixel pushing power, it's multisampling AA method are also far more advanced than the "super sampling" used by the 8500, in terms of the performance hit taken when putting it into use. Just as important, the adaptive algorithms controlling the multisampling ensure that there is little to no visual difference compared to the technically superior (for creating better looking images) super sampling.
Doom3
In Doom3, I found on "High Quality" setting within the game set up the Chaintech 6600GT was playable at 1280x1024 4xAA 8xAF. The Radeon 8500 (considered the low end card for the game) wasn't even able to struggle along at 800x600 with "Medium Quality" selected in Doom3's settings, and obviously no AA or AF. nVidia made sure that their cards would do well at this game by optimizing for OpenGL. Considering the large number of future games expected to use this as the engine, that's not a bad plan on their part. As can be seen, with some pretty hefty eye candy, the game still plays very well. Stepping down any one of the options (resolution, AF, AA, Quality) would still leave no points in time where the frame rate drops below 30. Or, there's always overclocking.
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