Gaming:

We used the latest official drivers and opted for maximum detail settings, so don’t be surprised at the results that the cards scored. By lowering certain settings you can reach a playable frame rate.

Certain games, such as Company of Heroes, benefit from graphics card memory, and Gainward BLISS 1024MB TV DD has proven that memory can be utilized well.

You’ll agree with us that it’s hard to tell whether the additional RAM paid off. If you’re playing without antialiasing and you want more frames, then it did; if you enjoy details, this memory is too slow compared to GDDR3 memory, like the one on Zotac 8600 GT card.









In Bio Shock, nothing will do the trick, at least until Nvidia fixes the drivers. Still, maybe it’s not the drivers’ fault; maybe ATI is just better in Bio Shock. We used the official 163.71 drivers, although we took a shot with 163.75 beta drivers, but they yielded the same results.







This morning, we downloaded a demo of the long awaited Unreal Tournament 3, and we tried to give it a spin with our Gainward card. In deathmatch mode, we chose Heat Ray map, sat in our mech and started spewing fire on everything that moved. We noticed that FPS is higher when we’re not using the mechanical robot.

Texture and environment details were set to high, and as you can see, we had enough frames for smooth gaming. 1280x1024 with antialiasing on was impossible. We’ll soon refresh the results with more cards.

Conclusion

Today, Gainward offered something different and this is our first Geforce 8600 GT with 1GB of memory.

The card performed well in most of the tests, even won in a couple, so those who are prone to changing cards will probably do well with one of these. The card supports HDMI, although you can’t say the support is smooth, and it has 1024MB of memory that is selling itself. Unreal Tournament 3 will run at 1024x768, and that’s enough for most of us.

We were surprised at how fast this card is, and it was quiet, too. Its slow memory is somewhat compensated for by the card’s faster core. The only flaw is that a cheaper Radeon HD 2600XT is often faster, and cheaper by far – but it doesn’t have 1024MB of memory.

If you want a lot of memory, and quite nice performance in gaming, this is the card for you.