GeForce 6800GT Questions

This card is not on the GPU list that Ivan Linden made up and had on the blog last month, so I was wondering how it stacks up (specifically, the PNY Verto GeForce® 8600 GT 256MB PCIe Graphics Card) compared to the 7900 and 8800, the two fastest cards on that list. I KNOW it is not going to beat the 8800, but it also doesn't have the excessive pricetag of the 8800. Theoretically, it SHOULD outperform the 7900 series, BUT I have noticed from the LL Graph, incresing numbers does not always mean better framerate.

Anyone have experience with this model?

Which card are you asking about, the 6800 or the 8600? With Nvidia cards, the second number is more important than the first. The first number tells you the series and thus the basic feature set that applies for all members for that series. The second number basically tells you how powerful the card is. Therefore an 8600 is a wimpier card than a 7900 and is even wimpier than a 6800. There is no real reason to go from a 6600 to a 7600 as they are pretty much the same card performance wise with the 7600 supporting newer shaders that all 7000 series cards support. My 6800Ultra will blow the doors off my two 8600GTs in SLI mode in Second Life framerate wise but it won't show the Windlight shaders the 8600s will.

I now have a 8800GTX and it has significantly better performance, it utterly crushes the two 8600s in SLI mode. The 8800s are expensive but you get what you pay for.