Recently I have test driven a number of new mid-range graphics cards built around the NVIDIA GeForce 6600 and ATi Radeon X700 GPUs. Although these are only mid-range graphics cards, they are capable of delivering performance that in some cases is able to rival that of the high-end products. While the performance side of these new ATi and NVIDIA cards is exceptionally good, its their value factor that has me sold. These graphics cards can be easily purchased for $200 US or less. Given that the GeForce 6600 GT was found outperforming a $500 US Radeon X800 graphics card in Doom 3, this is amazing value.

Looking over the prices at the local computer store, I noticed that the majority of Radeon X600XT and GeForce PCX 5900 graphics cards cost the same amount, or in some cases more, than their updated partners. This is interesting given the new mid-range solutions absolutely thrash the original ones. There really is no comparison between the GeForce 6600 GT and the older GeForce PCX 5900. The same can be said for the older Radeon X600XT and the new Radeon X700XT graphics cards. The updated models feature more pixel pipelines, updated rendering technology and higher clock frequencies.

These new ATi and NVIDIA graphics cards are set to take the mainstream market by storm, eliminating any of the current solutions such as the X600XT and PCX 5900. With GeForce 6600 and ATi Radeon X700 products dominating the mainstream performance market, which will end up in your case? There is a huge range of GeForce 6600 GT and Radeon X700XT graphics cards out there and more are soon to become available. Both of which will be available in 128MB and 256MB configurations.

The Radeon X700XT cards are not quite as readily available, where as there are plenty of X700 Pro products hitting shelves. Although the GeForce 6600 GT has been announced for quite some time now, it has only been recently that they have become available for purchase. Todays article will be comparing the Radeon X700XT against the GeForce 6600 GT to determine which product offers the best performance across a range of benchmark software. This will be done using the very latest drivers from both NVIDIA and ATi. Without wasting anymore time, let's jump into the benchmarking...