Pixel filling power
In order to wrap your head around the GeForce 6600 GT, you've got to start with the basic math involved here. In short, eight pipes times 500MHz equals Very Good Things. I've put this equation into table form below, complete with numbers for a whole host of competing cards. The table is sorted by multitextured fill rate, because that's one of the most important determinants of overall performance, even in many newer games. Have a look at how the GeForce 6600 GT stacks up.

Note: NVIDIA has confirmed to us that the NV43 can write only four color pixels per clock and has a fragment crossbar. The NV43 does appear to have eight pixel shader/texture units, so its not an "8 x 1" design or a "4 x 1" design. It's more of a hybrid, but the fragment crossbar ensures all four of the chip's ROPs are well utilized.

In case these numbers don't do it for you, let's put this into a little bit of perspective by comparing the 6600 GT to some of its closest competitors. When I say "competitors," by the way, I'm talking in terms of both price and performance. Virtually nothing out there now competes with the 6600 GT on both fronts simultaneously. For instance, the Radeon X600 XT is ostensibly ATI's $199 PCI Express card, but the X600 XT has only half the fill rate, or pixel-pushing capability, of the 6600 GT and quite a bit less memory bandwidth, as well.

As for the GeForce 6600 GT's predecessors, the story is a bit complicated. Oddly enough, NVIDIA's partners have been selling a pair of graphics cards for about the same price, roughly $175 online. The GeForce FX 5700 Ultra, sold primarily to the lower half of the bell curve, has under half the fill rate of the 6600 GT. The GeForce FX 5900 XT, which sells for the same price, is quite a bit more capable, with nearly 3.2 gigapixels per second of multitextured fill rate. Still, both cards fall well short of the GeForce 6600 GT's actual power, in part because NVIDIA's FX architecture doesn't always perform as well as it should.

To find a worthy competitor for the GeForce 6600 GT, you've got to look further up the food chain, into $299 territory. I had originally planned to test the 6600 GT against the Radeon 9800 Pro, but once I saw the initial benchmark numbers, I scrapped that plan and substituted a Radeon 9800 XT instead. This beast's street price is well over $300 right now at online vendors. But the numbers don't lie, and the 3.3 gigapixel fill rate of the Radeon 9800 XT doesn't match the 4 gigapixels of the 6600 GT. In fact, even NVIDIA's own brand-new $299 card, the GeForce 6800, trails the 6600 GT in overall fill rate. Yes, the Radeon 9800 XT has 256MB memory to the GeForce 6600 GT's 128MB, and both of the $299 cards have a memory bandwidth advantage over the 6600 GT. Still, the 6600 GT is one very potent $199 card.

I should mention that, for most cards these days, single-textured fill rate also corresponds roughly to pixel shading power. The GeForce 6600 GT has eight pixel shader units running at 500MHz. That adds up to slightly more pixel shading power than you'd find in a GeForce 6800, whose 12 pipes run at 325MHz. In today's newer games, shading power matters more than ever.

So yeah. I'll wipe the froth from my mouth, and we'll proceed to the benchmarks.

The 6600 GT's memory bandwidth appears to be a hindrance versus the $299 cards when only one texture is applied, but that problem vanishes with two or more textures, and the 6600 GT actually matches the GeForce 6800 stride for stride. Also, we can see the reasonably linear decay in RightMark performance for the 6600 GT as more textures are added, which suggests this is indeed an eight-pipe chip with one texture unit per pipe. The "four by two" design of the GeForce FX 5900 XT, which features four pipes with two texture units each, produces a zig-zag pattern as performance varies between odd and even numbers of textures.