X700XT vs. 6600GT - The reviews
Tom's Hardware:
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/index.html
How good is the Radeon X700 XT? This is a question that doesn't have a straightforward answer. In some games, the card offers very impressive performance, either remaining on par with NVIDIA's GeForce 6600 GT or even outpacing it. In other games, such as FarCry v1.1 and Doom 3, it loses by a considerable margin despite the A.I. optimizations with shader replacement. When these optimizations are turned off, the performance gap becomes even more pronounced. Yet even this observation is not a universal truth. In some games, deactivating A.I. either has no measurable effect or even results in improved performance. NVIDIA's GeForce 6600 GT, on the other hand, seems to have some performance problems of its own in some games. On the whole, the new mid-range cards from ATi and NVIDIA offer an excellent price to performance ratio and are sure to tempt or even convince many users to upgrade, once the AGP versions become available.
[H]ard OCP:
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjY2
The bad news first. AGP X700 cards are not going to be available for a good while. The good news is that they are very much expected before Christmas. Of course, for those of you that are looking at sliding into a socket 775 Pentium 4 system, you will be in luck very soon.
The competition in this mainstream product round is closer than what we have seen in a while as both video cards really do provide a great gaming experience for the price they are selling at. Just think a year ago the Radeon 9800Pro was the top of the line video card offering the best performance, and here we are now with the Radeon X700XT at $199 offering up the same performance the 9800Pro did and the GeForce 6600GT is offering up even better! ATI has managed to move high performance down into the mainstream, and this is nothing but good news for gamers. Let’s just hope a few of the bugs get worked out.
Anandtech:
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2214
In the end, the GeForce 6600 GT is a more versatile solution than the Radeon X700 XT that can deliver higher performance at more demanding settings. The X700 is certainly not a bad card, and street prices still remain to be seen. At publication, we found a 6600 GT available for $209 on pricewatch, though street prices for the X700 are not yet available. Unless the X700 XT is priced comfortably below its $199 MSRP, or you need the 256MB of the X700 Pro, the 6600 GT is the way to go for midrange cards.
Hexus
http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews/review.php?dXJsX3Jldmlld...
Price wise, ATI's official price point of $199 for the XT variant matches NVIDIA's agressive pricing for their 6600 GT. It's a race for both boards to get to retail so we can see if those assertions are correct.
While it was a shame we couldn't include specific X700 PRO performance numbers and analysis, it's possibly the more attractive board, based on the early analysis I performed. We'll cover that discretely and explain why as soon as we're able to.
Do I recommend X700 XT over 6600 GT? No, not in the configurations evaluated for their respective articles, but there's very little in it, and retail availability and pricing will decide what you the customer picks up.
It displaces 9800 XT with consumate ease, an AGP version is highly anticipated, but NVIDIA are arguably pushing more of the right buttons with NV43 at the time of writing.
Tech Report
http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q3/radeon-x700xt/index.x?pg...
For the time being, the GeForce 6600 GT appears to be the card of choice by the slimmest of margins. NVIDIA's $199 card seems to have slightly higher performance generally than the Radeon X700 XT, and it offers the possibility of upgrading to a dual-card SLI config at some point down the road, when the right motherboards become available. The GeForce 6600 GT also offers Shader Model 3.0 support, packaging together a number of incremental feature enhancements, including a more natural programming model, higher-precision pixel shaders, and 16-bit floating-point frame buffer blends. More importantly, the 6600 GT seems to have very few weaknesses in terms of performance, image quality, and features.
Bit Tech
http://www.bit-tech.net/review/357
We mentioned the fact that the board was unable to complete our full test suite due to problems with both the boards' thermal management and the drivers. We are told that the thermal issues that we encountered with the sample board were a problem that was specific to the board that we tested - this will be confirmed at a later date when we get the chance to test another X700 XT once the driver bugs have been addressed and fixed. Nonetheless, this does appear to have an air of a rush-release about it - clearly ATI are worried about the 6600 cards.
X-Bit Labs
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/ati-radeon-x70...
The performance of the RADEON X700 XT in synthetic tests doesn’t allow us to make a final verdict about it. It is worse than the GeForce 6600 GT in simple multi-texturing tests and at executing pixel shaders that actively use textures. On the other hand, ATI’s new GPU has six vertex processors against three in the GeForce 6600 GT and outperforms the rival in tests where the speed of processing vertexes and executing vertex shaders is paramount. The RADEON X700 XT is also better than the GeForce 6600 GT when executing “calculations-heavy” pixel shaders. We might say that the new mainstream chips expose more clearly all the advantages and weaknesses of the respective top-end architectures, NV40 and R420.
EVE-Online: MMOG defined.
