Nvidia 8600M performance, general discussion

Yes, the 8600m GS, especially if it's GDDR3, will outperform the 7600 by alot, actually.

 

Hi

Below are the basic specs of the laptop im
really interested in buying:

Intel core 2 duo (T7500 2.2 GHz)
2GB DDR II SDRAM - 667 MHz
320GB - Serial ATA-150 - 5400rpm
256MB Nvidia geforce 8600M GT
17" WUXGA 1920 X 1200
Windows vista premium
Blu-ray player/recorder

Now i dont know to much about GPU'S
but i do know that the 8600m gt wont be able to play games anywhere near the laptops native resolution (which im not to bothered about) but if everyone could possibly tell me what games will play on this laptop at good levels it would really be appreciated.

Thankyou

 

Well, every game I have tried played fine for me. WOW at max settings, C&C3@ max settings, Oblivion@ 1024X768 on high with 2AA and I got 25fps outside and 30fps inside, CSS/HL2@max settings.

 

yeah that is pretty impresive. I wonder if we can do the same thing with the 8600m GT

 

Curious, you opted for the higher(est) end CPU available for your machine, but went with a 5400rpm hdd? Its going to significantly slow your load time, but you should be able to run just about every game on the market, with low-medium settings on the most gpu intensive games.

 

Right now, anything.

 

he obviously wants a 320 gig hard drive; storage space is more important than speed. that makes sense if you are dealing with a bluray recorder that holds 25 gigs on a single layer.

movie buff over here.

of course, the 8600m gt being able to play native res depends on the native res.

you don't really have much of a chance at 1920x1200. the good news is that with such a high resolution screen, the effects of interpolation are going to be low. you could easily run 1440x900 or 1280x800 with only a very minimal blurriness, full screen, that won't bother you at all. you might not even be able to tell that it is interpolated and not just a native 1280x800 or 1440x900 screen.

rainbow six: vegas isn't really happy in any resolution. by default, it will run O.K. in 800x600 at medium settings. not great, just decent. after significant tweaking of the game files and the display driver, you can get 1440x900 running well at higher settings. Obviously this speaks poorly of the game and not the gpu, (although possibly also the display driver).

games like FEAR, BF2 / 2142 - you will be able to max out the settings, but with FEAR you might want to kick the res down to 1280x800 (still higher than console hd resolution), whereas bf2 / 2142 runs well in 1440x900, you might even be able to go higher but i have 1440x900 so im topped out.

Any source game you will max out the settings and probably run in native resolution also.

hope that helps

 

With an 8600M GT, ANY game available now and out in the next few months at least is playable on good settings. It would start to groan a little for the demanding games at high settings and high resolutions, but as long as you don't push that all the time, you will be playing the most demanding games released for the rest of the year. I'd guess you won't have problems with most new games release for another year or two, provided you have no qualms with lowering the settings every now and again as games get more taxing.

 

If it's DDR2 it will be a problem. If it's DDR3 then it won't be one.

 

Would the 8600m GT combined with my notebook specs (signature) be able to run Microsoft Flight Simulator X on med-high settings? If so, 'damn'

 

yea definatly especially with 4 gb ram

 

Awesome, thank you for upping my confidence .

 

anyone tried maxing out medieval 2 on an 8600GT?

 

games that will definitely give 8600M GT problems(eg. games the card can't play at high settings). I'm basing this on my desktop 8600GT(much higher clocked than 8600M GT, 620 core and 1700 mem)

Stalker(anything higher than static lighting)=very low fps
Rainbow Las Vegas= plays fine on the desktop 8600GT but I can imagine it giving problems to the laptop version
Lost Planet(both DX9 and DX10 modes)= 20-25fps on desktop with mostly high settings on 1280* something resolution. I can easily see it dip below 20s on the laptop version.

I'm going to expect medium settings on future games like Crysis, BioShock, etc

 

I believe its something wrong with the game itself. I cant get more than 30 fps on my desktop.

 

No. I could play that game on my laptop with Radeon X1400 w/ 512MB VRAM on (almost) max setting (low anti-aliasing and texturing filtering). 8600 should not be a problem AT ALL.

 

How many fps are u getting at max settings ?

 

40-50. 60 if I'm lucky. My naked eyes can't see any un-smoothness. But when I max anti-aliasing and texture filtering (which I have no idea what they do), the game slows down significantly, and the FPS is about 20-30. But, I can't see differences between having and not having anti-aliasing and texture filtering.

 

Sounds good to me ! Thanks for the info

 

NP. Here are the full specs of my old system...

Intel Duo Core 1.86GHz
2GB RAM at 663MHz
ATI Radeon X1400 512MB HyperMemory

Any idea what anti-aliasing and texture filtering are?

 

Anti-aliasing is the technique of minimizing the distortion artifacts known as aliasing when representing a high-resolution signal at a lower resolution.

Texture filtering is the method used to determine the texture color for a texture mapped pixel, using the colors of nearby texels (pixels of the texture).

 

In other words (to simplify Age of wind's explanation), have you ever noticed that when you play a game some of the diagonal lines are sort of jagged looking? Where instead of seeing a clean, straight line of that door, you see a jagged diagonal? Well, Anti-Aliasing uses several approaches to smooth out this jagged diagonal line and make it look much cleaner.

Extremetech has a FANTASTIC article about this, its only a few pages long.

 

I pay a lot of attention to graphics and sound, and I wish I could tweek the sound quality as much as the video quality on my computers; but I've never noticed jagged lines... I've noticed corners instead of arches.

 

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3029&p=3

the desktop 8600GT can't max out any of the new games, the 8600M GT is even worse.

but still i do question their results I got 20-25fps on Lost Planet on DX9 with all settings to max except HDR which was set to medium.

 

Does anyone know if it's 256 dedicated?

First post~
Thanks for assistance, i'm a noob!

 

yeh its 256mb dedicated memory

 

The only 8600m GT with less than 256MB of dedicated memory that I know of is the $2000 MacBookPro. So, unless it's a MBP, I'd say yes.

 

What is the difference in performance?

 

oh thank you guys so much!
I am going to go ahead and buy that asus laptop tomarrow I think. Is there any reason why you guys would tell me to stay away from that particular laptop or company? as a last minute word of caution?

 

Those are scary results for 8600m GT owners. Basically you can forget about playing DX10 games on it. Unless future drivers get so good they'd somehow double performance - only then would these games get playable (in DX10 - the DX9 version would play better of course). Damn, I was looking forward to playing Crysis with some of the new DX10 features on a new Macbook Pro, but that probably won't happen.

 

yeah i forgot about that. the 8600m GT is ddr2....

 

its unlikely that drivers will improve performance by a factor of 2x with these games.

however it is very likely that future games will be created properly (crysis *cough*) that will have small advantages in terms of both performance and visuals.

 

so why do people say the 8600 GS is such a disappointment? i can't decide if i'm going to get a more poorly built laptop with an 8600GT or a better built laptop with an 8600 GS.

 

Most of it I think stems from the g1s vs. the f3sv post on the asus forums. The initial benchmark results came in and it was g1s with 4k 3dmark06 score and the f3sv with a 2k, and people thought wow 8600m gt is 2x the gs! but obviously that's not the case. If clock speeds and GDDR3/GDDR2 is taken into consideration the 8600m GS GDDR3 is probably on par or just a little bit weaker than the GDDR2 8600m GT.

 

Yeah, from what I've heard Lost Planet is not a good indicator of DX10 performance. Everything I've seen has indicated poor, poor coding on part of the game.

 

Agreed ! Very poor performance even on my desktop !

 

I was wondering, with the GDDR2 8600M GT having such lower clock speeds than the GDDR3 version (but being so much cheaper..) is it possible to safely overclock it on a laptop to reach the same or very close to the same clock speeds?

 

it depends. some people's gddr2 chips will be able to clock all the way up to stock gddr3 speeds. with others, you can't even get near that.

in general, almost doubling the gpu memory clock is probably "unsafe," but it can definitely be done with some chips.

its a toss up as to whether or not you can do it, and how much risk you are undertaking; its just that some batches of silicon are higher quality than others. definitely though, once you hit 700mhz from a stock 400mhz, you are not in a comfortable safe zone.

 

Some aren't. I know the MBPs are GDDR3. The G1S is too i think.

 

What amount of overclocking would be "safe" but provide some kind of noticeable difference? Or is there any real gameplay difference between a 512 8600 M GT with GDDR2 and a 256MB 8600M GT with GDDR3?

 

An overclock of 10% or more will create a noticable increase in performance (10% more FPS, I.E. If it was 30 before, now its 33. I've heard that the 8600m GT is VERY overclockable (in most cases). I think if you managed to clock your memory up 25% you'd be set. Its possible with some 8600m GTs (on an individual basis) to clock up the memory almost 50% (I've only heard of this once), that would REALLY be a noticeable overclock. If you clock up the memory quite a bit, you should be extra careful. Keep a very close eye on your GPU temperature readout. The highest temperature I've heard of for an 8600m GT overclock is 93 degrees Celsius. Personally, I wouldn't dare go above 90 degrees Celsius.

Good luck, the gap in performance isn't quite as drastic as some think it is, and even the GDDR2 models are vastly superior (2 times as powerful, in fact) to my X800m, which runs most modern games (FEAR, HL2) on high settings at 1680x1050 at 25+ FPS (and 40+ FPS in the case of HL2) and REALLY modern games (Supreme Commander, Company of Heroes) at medium settings and 1440x900 with 20+ FPS.

And remember, when you overclock, increase Mhz about 5-10 and then test out the results. If things are doing well, increase another 5-10 Mhz. When things start to artifact or the temp goes above 90 Celsius, bring the overclock down 15Mhz or so and that will generally be your safest overclock value. NEVER start out ramping up Mhz in 50+ chunks. I did that once and completely fried my $250 7950GTX.

 

i think my 8600gs is ddr2 because of the 500/400 clock. It gets a 2500 on the 3dmark06 on stock clock speeds.

 

okay so i bought the laptop.... cant wait for it to get here!
any one have a suggestions as to how to get the most out of the video card?

 

Just having a look at the Macbook Pro. I would install XP/Vista on it for gaming. Was wondering though how such a graphics card would perform in gaming? The notebook's specs would be,
2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
2GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM - 2x1GB
120GB Serial ATA Drive @ 5400 rpm
NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT w/ 128MB SDRAM

Games I plan to play are - Battlefield 2, C&C 3, F.E.A.R., S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Crysis - mainly RTS & FPS games..

If I upgraded to 4GB RAM how much better would the games perform?

 

The general consensus is that at lower resolutions, the difference in performance is pretty minor. When running some of these games at native 1440x900 resolution, the framerate differences are much more noticeable in games like FEAR, etc.

So the extra VRAM will generally make a difference if you plan to game at 1440x900; otherwise, the 128MB VRAM 8600M GT seems to perform quite well on its own.

The extra RAM could help to some degree as well, depending on the game.

 

Agreed, the 128mb 8600GT isn't at all crippled like the 128mb x1600 was. It performs slightly worse, as should be expected, but on lower resolutions/lower texture details the difference really shouldn't be noticeable.

 

you might not want to run FEAR or Crysis - (guessing) in 1440x900, the rest should be fine at that resolution.

 

If I get 4GB RAM, I will be able to play (most of) those games at max resolution with a decent fps (about 40 or better)? I generally don't play my games at max resolution anyway but just wanted to know how good of a graphics card this is. Basically such a notebook should do fine for my gaming needs, right? And, I would get (much) better gaming performance on XP than Vista, for the time being until Vista has been improved & gets better drivers?

 

On Asus notebooks an extra gig of ram (from 2GB to 3GB) showed a noticeable improvement when using 8600m GS cards, I believe. I believe 4GB (in windows) makes for some good turbocache room. So yeah, it might increase performance a few FPS (maybe from 20 to 30) in cases where your video ram is full up.

 

At max resolutions, some of the games you mentioned like FEAR would not get 40fps or better with only 128MB of VRAM. You'd need to drop down in resolution and possibly quality settings.

It's a good card, but again, if you really want to play at 1440x900, it might not be enough VRAM for the framerates you're looking for.

-Zadillo