Pixel filling and shader power
As usual, let's kick things off with a look at how our cards compare when it comes to theoretical fill rate and memory bandwidth peaks. Theoretical peaks don't always determine real world performance, but they should give us a rough idea of what to expect from the cards we've assembled. The chart below is arranged in order of ascending multi-texturing fill rate.

Although their unconventional eight-pipe, four-ROP configuration gives them a comparatively weak single-texturing fill rate, our GeForce 6600 GT cards are well ahead of the field when it comes to multi-texturing. The 6600 GT cards also have a healthy advantage over the X700 Pros when it comes to peak memory bandwidth.

In the vanilla department, the Albatron GeForce 6600 may have a hard time keeping up with the standard Radeon X700. The X700 not only has superior single- and multi-texturing fill rate, it's also packing 1.6GB/sec more memory bandwidth.

Let's see how these theoretical peaks pan out in 3DMark05's synthetic fill rate tests.

Things stack up pretty much as expected, although there are a few surprises in the single-texturing test. The XFX GeForce 6600 GT and Gigabyte Radeon X700 Pro cards score better than their counterparts, suggesting that both peak memory bandwidth and memory capacity impact performance in this test. Curiously, the Albatron GeForce 6600 manages a slightly better single-texturing fill rate than the Radeon X700, although in the multi-texturing test, the X700 leaves the Albatron card in the dust.

With today's latest games loaded with shader-driven effects, shader power has become increasingly important. 3DMark05 has a handful of synthetic pixel and vertex shader tests that can help us isolate each card's shader potential.

The GeForce 6600 GT cards run away with the pixel shader test, in part because of their impressive 500MHz core clock speeds. However, the fact that the GeForce 6600 beats the vanilla Radeon X700, which has a 100MHz core clock speed advantage, suggests that the GeForce 6600 series' pixel shaders also deliver superior clock-for-clock performance to ATI's Radeon X700 pixel shaders.

Scores are pretty close in the simple vertex shader test, but with more complex vertex shaders, the Radeon X700 family clearly has an advantage. The Radeon X700 family boasts a total of six vertex shaders while the GeForce 6600 family only has three. Although the strength of ATI and NVIDIA's individual vertex shaders isn't directly comparable, the X700s appear to offer more vertex processing power than the GeForce 6600s.