Radeon HD 2600 XT vs. GeForce 8600 GT

Final Thoughts...

It seems an age since I started this review before Computex, and it’s taken me the best part of a couple of months to get through the teething problems. I guess it’s now time to start drawing some conclusions on what I’ve seen.

Both the Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4 and the GeForce 8600 GT have been victims of hype in my opinion. When I say hype, I mean that, based on the tremendous value for money the mid-range graphics cards of the past year have delivered, many were expecting both AMD and Nvidia to come up trumps with two new mid-range price/performance masterclasses. That, unfortunately, hasn’t happened though.

We’re left with a situation where there is a massive gap between the high-end and the mid-range. Let’s focus on each card separately – we’ll look at gaming first.

First, Nvidia’s GeForce 8600 GT fits in to the company’s DirectX 10 line up quite well – it’s cheaper than the GeForce 8600 GTS and delivers a fairly respectable gaming experience compared to that card in isolation. However, things don’t look quite so good once you compare it to the previous generation cards like the GeForce 7900 GS, or Radeon X1950 Pro which can be picked up for around the same price.

The Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4, on the other hand performs worse than the GeForce 8600 GT in four of the five titles we’ve tested with anti-aliasing, but fares a lot better against the 8600 GT when you disable anti-aliasing. On that front, the HD 2600 XT GDDR4 looks to have taken a leaf out of the Radeon HD 2900 XT’s book and seems to solidify the fact that there is something seriously wrong with AMD's anti-aliasing performance on its HD 2000-series of products. All we can hope for is improvements in performance over subsequent driver releases, but we’re not going to hold much hope for that one happening - it looks more fundamental than that.

Obviously, if you’re purely after card for gaming, the Radeon X1950 Pro and GeForce 7900 GS look a better value for money in the short term, as there is no really compelling DirectX 10 content out there at the moment. Of course, that’s about to change when Bioshock, World in Conflict, Crysis, et al arrive later in the year, but we can’t evaluate a graphics card while trying to predict what might happen in the future – we’ll be visiting those games as they come out.

When you look at the cards’ HD Video decoding features, things start to look a little better, but let’s be honest – who’s buying an HD DVD or Blu-ray drive for their PC at the moment? The early adopters are the film buffs that want the best thing out there and, frankly, the PC isn’t the best way to play HD movies.

There’s no support for HDMI 1.3, which enables features like Deep Colour (36-bit RGB), Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD Master Audio, but that’s not really AMD or Nvidia’s fault. PC display technology has fallen behind HDTV technology and we’re still stuck running 24-bit colour on Windows-based machines – that’s not going to change until Microsoft updates Windows to support higher colour bit-rates.

However, that proves the point I’m trying to make here – if you’re after the best movie experience available, you’ll want a device that supports the latest HDMI standards. HD DVD/Blu-ray PC drives are too expensive for all but the movie enthusiasts/early adopters and those are the guys that want the best possible experience.

Final, Final Thoughts...

Neither the GeForce 8600 GT and Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4 deliver a good enough gaming experience to give the previous generation cards a run for their money in the variety of games we’ve tested here. Sadly, there’s no compelling DirectX 10 content out there at the moment and that’s a good enough reason to stay away from these cards for the time being.

If you’re on a tight budget and need to buy a graphics card for around £80 today, we’d recommend looking at the Radeon X1950 Pro as it’ll offer a consistently better gaming experience than the new mid-range cards from AMD and Nvidia. If AMD and Nvidia’s promises of DirectX 10 content that performs well on mid-range hardware hold true, this may change in the future. However, we’re unable to predict what might happen when in the future - at least on the performance front.

Finally, if you’re a movie buff, you’ll probably find the new HD video acceleration features in both of these new GPUs cool – we do too. Sadly though, the current 24-bit colour depth limitation in Windows means that your HD movie playback device is not only going to cost more than a set top box, but it’s also not going to be able to match their feature set.

Sapphire Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4

• Features
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• 9/10

• Performance
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• -
• -
• 5/10

• Value
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• -
• 6/10

• Overall
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• -
• 6/10

Asus EN8600GT 256MB

• Features
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Performance
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• -
• 6/10

• Value
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• 7/10

• Overall
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• 7/10

What do these scores mean?