MSI GeForce 8500 GT and 8600 GT Comparison - Page 5 of 8
Review By Jonathan Martini - July 13, 2007
DOOM 3 PERFORMANCE
Performance in Doom 3 was determined by executing a timedemo of the built-in demo1 demo along with a HOCBench timedemo in order to examine the performance of the card under different conditions.
Doom 3 Settings
Doom 3 Performance Results - demo1
There are a couple notes to be made with these results. First and most obvious is the direct comparison at the same settings between both the 8500 GT and the 8600 GT OC. At every setting above the 800x600 resolution, the 8600 GT OC is doubling the performance of the 8500 GT. Secondly, at 1280x1024 and 1600x1200, the performance hit on both the 8500 GT and the 8600 GT OC when antialiasing and anisotropic filtering are enabled is the roughly the same. I would have thought the additional horsepower of the 8600 GT OC would have reduced the performance hit of the image quality enhancing effects as at these resolutions the 8800 series don't take as much of a hit when the image quality enhancing effects are utilized.
Doom 3 Performance Results - HOCBench
For the HOCBench demo, we see the 8600 GT OC doubling the performance of the 8500 GT across the board. The same arguments stated for the results of the demo1 timedemo above can be repeated here.
F.E.A.R. PERFORMANCE
Benchmark results in F.E.A.R. were based on the built-in performance test. Physics and graphics settings are documented in the table below.
F.E.A.R. Settings
F.E.A.R.'s auto-detect engine set the performance level of the PC at medium, while my older, but higher clocked Intel P4 560 was labeled as high due to the game not being able to take advantage of multi-core CPU's. I upped the video settings to the "high" setting. This increased the Water Resolution and Videos setting.
F.E.A.R. Performance Results - 1024x768
F.E.A.R. Performance Results - 1280x1024
Once again, the performance difference between the 8500 GT and the 8600 GT OC is apparent. A noticeable aspect is that NVIDIA's anisotropic filtering implementation in the 8 Series of cards is more efficient than on previous generations. Increasing the anisotropic filtering level had a miniscule performance impact on both cards.
