Ericwaycotx

Ok, well, I'm going to be ordering a new videocard this weekend, but I can't decide between the two cards. I know the 7900GS is a slightly faster card, but the 8600GT is Dx10. My absolute maximum budget is $150. If there is a faster card for the price range please let me know as well.

Which would you guys recommend and why?

Eric

manic

Unless your running vista, you will not be able to take advantage of
dx10.

1 g0t 0wn3d

Judging from your psu you will need a new one to for ether card.

Ericwaycotx

I don't remember posting a PSU question?

twajetmech

No, you did not, however to answer your question and not mention that your current psu that you have listed in your signature is inadequate for either of the videocards you are intrested in would be irresponsible on our part. If you are not runing or planning to run Vista then the 7900gs will be fine, if you are going to run vista and want all the eye candy then the 8600gt would be the choice

1 g0t 0wn3d

We are helping you with a new video card....which means wwe take into account your psu.

floydfan

his current card is more power hungry than both the new ones... regardless, a new psu wouldn't hurt as that psu is a pos, but its up to you. as for the topic, the 8600gt will be too slow to be useful in dx10. i say get a 7900gs, which by the way can sometimes be unlocked into a 7900gt, and wait for the new generation of dx10 midrange cards.

1 g0t 0wn3d

the 8600 gt is almost as fast as the 7900 gs (dx10 is going to make the processing flow more fluidly makeing the card work for dx10)

TheMatt

I know that the 8600GTS can easily beat a 7900GT, so I wouldn't be surprised if the 8600GT will be a little better than the 7900GS. I know without looking at specs that in newer games the 8600GT will always win because it has over four times the shader processing power which is becoming increasingly important. The only bottleneck is the memory bandwidth. But remember, you can always go SLI later if you have an SLI board.

floydfan

i would like for you to back up your claim that a 8600gts is as fast as a 7900gt, because i can provide you with evidence to the contrary. http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/vid...s_9.html#sect1 in fact, the 8600gts loses in some places to the 7900gs and it is a superior card to the 8600gt. while dx10 will enable cards to display more for the same processing power, the fact still stands that g84 is a weak architecture, and is not any faster than the mainstream cards already out, and they just will not handle dx10 era games well, whether in dx9 or dx10 mode, so you might as well get the best performing card, which is the 7900gs. the 8600gt is an inferior card, as unfortunate as it is...

Kalim

I don't expect anything of the mid-range cards out by both ATI and nVidia to run DX10 decently. Many of them lose out to the last generation cards in older games. Promises are for the cards to excel as driver coding and game coding is more optimized with less surface texture deletion.

But in the end, I very much doubt anything but the high end cards of nowadays can adequately handle DX10 for the future. Not even for the present DX10 games and applications.

TheMatt

Take a look at this:
http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards....=384&card2=512

The 7900GT wins in pixel fill rate which is meant for older cards, and they both have the same texture fill rate.

But the 8600GTS can do over 4 times as many shader operations which is very important and is now a direct indication of performance in graphics cards. This is evidence by the famous X1800XT/X1950XT ratio. The X1950XT was otherwise identical to the X1800XT (with the exception of memory bandwidth) but had 3 times the shader processing power as it and as a result did almost twice as well in 3DMark06.

Take a look at this:
http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards....=467&card2=326

More reading:
http://www.gpureview.com/fragment-pi...ticle-393.html
http://www.gpureview.com/shader-oper...ticle-357.html

An 8600GTS will loose to an X1950XT but not to a 7900GT because the nVidia 7 series lacks the very shader processing power that newer games need.

Maybe the memory bandwidth of the 8600GTS is limited (~10GB/s lower than the 7900GT stock), but as long as you aren't doing 16x AA and AF and use Texture Compression, then the memory bandwidth won't be a huge bottleneck.

Ericwaycotx

Thanks all, I picked up a 8600GTS for 164 on newegg. Should be here on Monday!

Kalim

Better future-proofed, you're welcome.

TheMatt

Nice choice.