How Future Proof is the 8600m gt ddr3 Card?

Something is wrong with your card, its DDR2, or you're running at a higher resoltuion than you think. My stock 8600 GDDR3 gets ~4100 at 1280:1024, so wileys results at 1280:800 with an overclocked card are more than reasonable.

 

Would you guys say that the ddr 2 versions of 8600m gt and 9600m gt are future proof?

Oh yeh and one more thing, ive notice a lot of people on this forum ranking 9600m gs and 9600m gt ddr2 over the 8600m gt ddr 3, performance and 3dmark wise i just don't think its true. Am i the only one whos not smoking crack?

 

The GDDR2 and DDR3 versions of each card stand and fall together. The GDDR3 is definitely better, but the difference is not great enough for a game to work with one card and not the other. To be honest, I believe the benchmarking software makes the GDDR3 version look somewhat better than it actually is (i.e. you will not see as large a performance difference in all games).

I don't know about the 9600M GS, but it is true on average of the 9600M GT. Your highly overclocked 8600 may get a higher score than a stock DDR2 9600, but that kind of overclocking is not common and if we selected a similarly overclocked 9600, I think it would still get higher scores.

 

the 9600m gt ddr 2 has slower memory and cant be overclocked to a ddr3 card's level, thats where the performance difference comes from.

 

Well I would say the 8600m GT will definitely struggle with Far Cry 2. However the game can probably be optimized just like Crysis to run good on a 8600m GT. 8600 GTS id essentially a 8700m GT performance wise and these 8700m GT´s overclock like crazy. I had 8700m GT SLI in my first XPS M1730 and I had them overclocked **** high

Remember guys 3D Mark is heavily dependent on what CPU speed you have. Just look at Quad Core scores they are pretty high. I would recommend to run 3D Mark 05 instead which do not rely so much on the CPU as 3D Mark 06 does.

 

no card is futureproof today, the only card that was ever pretty futureproof was the 8800gtx, it lasted over 2 years and still rocks even today. But yes, atleast go for gddr3, ddr2 will kill performance and bandwidth for texture heavy games

 

I agree the 8800GTX is the most future proof GPU for a long time. I still have my 8800GTX and it runs great.