Final thoughts

NVIDIA’s delivered another compelling GPU with the GeForce 7600 GS. You’ve got a card that delivers performance that’s greater than last year’s mainstream GPU of choice, the 6600 GT. In shader-heavy cases like F.E.A.R. the difference is as great as 10% at 800x600, while another shader-heavy case, Half-Life 2 Lost Coast sees even larger margins. The difference is greater than 20% at 1280x1024 and 1600x1200, despite the GeForce 6600 GT’s faster memory subsystem. With the GeForce 7600 GS delivering this kind of performance at price points similar to the GeForce 6600 GT, we’d definitely consider it to be the wiser upgrade. Basically the GeForce 7600 GS makes us forget about the 6600 GT. On top of this the board does all this with just passive cooling, and still supports NVIDIA’s transparency AA mode.

If NVIDIA can stick to the board’s $129-$149 price point, the GeForce 7600 GS could become a pretty popular solution for the lower-end of the mainstream segment. The GeForce 7600 GS trades blows with ATI’s more expensive Radeon X1600 XT, delivering superior performance in the flight sims we tested as well as Quake 4 and Serious Sam 2, while falling behind in titles such as Call of Duty 2, and Battlefield 2. Performance is pretty even in F.E.A.R. (with the X1600 XT coming in slightly ahead) and Half-Life 2 Lost Coast, where the X1600 XT fell behind in our HDR testing, but runs faster than the GeForce board once 4xAA is enabled. In terms of pricing, X1600 XT prices generally start around $150 and go up from there. And while we didn’t run tests today with the Radeon X1600 Pro, the board ships with a graphics core than runs 90MHz slower than the X1600 XT, while the X1600 Pro’s memory runs at nearly half the speed of the XT; we just don’t see the X1600 Pro keeping up with the GeForce 7600 GS.

Don’t get us wrong, you won’t confuse the GeForce 7600 GS’s performance with that of a GeForce 7600 GT. NVIDIA’s clearly built-in quite a bit of performance between the two cards, and while we didn’t have a GeForce 7600 GS board to test out overclocking with, we have a hard time seeing 400MHz DDR2 modules running at the 7600 GT’s stock memory frequency of 700MHz, so gamers looking for the most performance possible will still want to opt for the GeForce 7600 GT if they can afford it. The cheapest 7600 GT boards sell for just under $190, so you’ll pay about $50 more for a 7600 GT than a 7600 GS. In general, that $50 will buy you another 25-35% in performance, so you are getting your money’s worth out of the deal. More casual gamers though would likely be better served by the GeForce 7600 GS. And we certainly can’t wait to check out the HDCP-ready card from ASUS. Like we said earlier, it will probably be a huge hit among media center users.

In terms of availability, we’ve been told by NVIDIA that today’s GeForce 7600 GS announcement is “another hard launch”, with retail availability starting today, just like the GeForce 7600 GT and GeForce 7900 GT/GTX cards introduced a few weeks ago. In fact we were told that the GeForce 7600 GS launch was pulled from March 9th to today in order to ensure this. However, the fact that we weren’t able to get a reference board from NVIDIA nor a retail card from one of their board partners in time for this article strongly suggests otherwise. Gigabyte sent out a press release earlier today announcing their GeForce 7600 GS-powered GV-NX76G256D-RH. In the PR Gigabyte stated that their GV-NX76G256D-RH card wouldn’t be available until April. We have a feeling that timeframe is a little more accurate, and wouldn’t be surprised to see the GeForce 7600 GS hit retail en masse around then.

If you’re in the market for a midrange graphics upgrade, we’d highly suggest you check out the GeForce 7600 GS. After testing this product and the GeForce 7600 GT earlier this month, it certainly looks like NVIDIA’s got a pretty strong successor to the GeForce 6600 line. We wouldn’t be surprised to see these 7600 cards sell like hotcakes, just like the GeForce 6600s did…