8600GTS/GT benchmarked

I WAS LUCKY get some quality time with a 8600GTS and 8600GT recently, and happened upon a few numbers you might be interested in. All numbers were measured on an Intel X6800 machine running the latest 3DMark.

The raw scores are 5500 3DMark06 for the GTS and 4800 for the GT, blurred slightly to protect the guilty. That is the good part. The bad part is when you start using heavy textures, performance drops off notably, and I mean notably. Think cliff.

This is most likely because of two things, drivers or bus width. NV drivers are still pretty badly broken, and upcoming cards are probably less of a priority than getting the ones they released almost 6 months ago functional.

The other thing it could be is the narrow memory bus simply choking on all the data. If this is the case, don't look for improvements, this card will always be a benchmark special.

There could be a host of other things, from pre-production boards (doubtful in this case), to sunspots, but the performance drop is quite real. Keep an eye out for this when the boards are finally released on April 17. µ