Author: Chris Hunter

The crew at pconline.com.cn obtained a NVIDIA G94-300 9600GT graphics card through "certain channels." They did an excellent job of presenting the facts about the 9600GT, and performed a healthy comparison against three other cards. The prospects for the unreleased G94 models are exciting to say the least.

The graphics cards used for comparison against the G94-300-A1 non-retail-core are the 8800GS, the 8600GTS, and the HD3850. Pconline put the video cards through a gauntlet of top-notch games to expose the 9600GT to its first real-world benchmarks. The game titles include Lost Planet, Fear, and Crysis among others. They also performed some synthetic benchmarks with the 3DMark 06 suite v110.

In order to prevent any bottlenecking related to the CPU, they implement a Core 2 Duo QX6800, which is operating at 266x11 or 2.93GHz. The test system has two gigs of DDR2 800 with timings of 4-4-4-12. All of these components reside on a Gigabyte DQ6 motherboard with a P35 chipset. The storage medium for the test setup is a SATA 320GB 7200.10 from Seagate. The operating system is Windows Vista Ultimate edition, and they utilize the latest drivers for the pre-existing video cards. For the 9600GT, they have to use beta driver version 171.16 Vista. The hardware then plugs into a Samsung T-305(30"@2560x1600).

To be fair, the video cards that were used for comparison have less memory and bandwidth than the 9600GT. Regarding RAM, the 8600GTS has 256MB; the 8800GS has 384MB; and the HD3850 has 256MB. The 9600GT's RAM consists of eight 512Mbit*32-bit Samsung 1.0ns chips. Together, they provide the 256-bit 512MB memory capacity.

Overall, the video card performed well for an 8600 series replacement. In all of the games the test team played, the 9600GT either maintained the 8800GS levels, or out-performed them by a large margin. The G94's best performances were in Call of Juarez, Company of Heroes, UT3, and FEAR. The 9600GT's lead was substantial on those games, and more than likely due to the better memory interface. Otherwise, the 8800 and 9600 variants were within 2-5% of each other. ATi's card had a presence, but it was not consistent and not enough.