Real-world benchmarks 

Now, time for the real meat of our review - Real-world game testing.  Here, we put our review board through its paces in nine game titles, utilising NVIDIA's High Quality texture filtering throughout.

As per usual for our reviews, we've picked out two resolutions to focus on here - Firstly, 1024x768, followed by 1280x1024 to see how the part fares under more intense circumstances.  Both resolutions are tested both without anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, then again with 4x AA and 8x AF.

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

First on our benchmarking list is the game of the moment - Oblivion.  This vast and beautiful RPG has captured the imagination of many, and is a hugely intensive game on even a current high-end system to boot.

Due to the nature of this title, we've split our testing into two benchmarks, both using results recorded by FRAPS - The first takes in an indoor section of the game, and the second a large outdoor expanse.  For our testing without anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, we've broadly used the game's 'Medium' quality settings, and switched on High Dynamic Range rendering.  For testing with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, we have dropped the use of HDR and instead opted to use Bloom, as neither current NVIDIA boards nor the game title itself currently support HDR with AA.

In one of Oblivion's indoor scenarios, the GeForce 7600 GS keeps pace with the 7600 GT every step of the way.

Adding anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering to the workload, there's still nothing to tell between the two boards, with barely a single frame per second between them.

The GeForce 7600 GT's slightly higher fill rate final begins to show through as we up the resolution to 1280x1024, as the 7600 GS slips a few frames per second behind. 

1280x1024 with 4x AA and 8x AF is still playable on both boards here, and indeed we again find the Galaxy board on a par with its more illustrious rival. 

Now we move outdoors, and watch frame rate sink like a stone even at 1024x768.  Anyhow, this resolution sees the GeForce 7600 GS fall behind its bigger brother, but still only by a couple of frames per second.

Memory bandwidth becomes more important once anti-aliasing is enabled, and as both boards share the same memory speed and thus bandwidth, the performance gap is closed between the two parts.

Again, rendering without AA sees this GeForce 7600 GS only a couple of frames per second behind the GT.

Final, we return to a neck-and-neck situation at 1280x1024 with 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering.

Quake 4

Next up is the Doom 3 engine based OpenGL title, Quake 4, which makes heavy use of stencil shadows to provide a dark, atmospheric feel to this latest title in the famous Quake franchise.  Here, we use a custom timedemo in the game's Ultra quality mode.

It's no secret that NVIDIA parts love the Doom 3 engine, and our results here back that up considerably, with both boards pulling over 100 frames per second at 1024x768.

Adding anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering at this resolution seems to be a sweet spot for the GeForce 7600, as it sits nicely around the 60 frames per second mark.

The GeForce 7600 GT finally opens up a lead of a few frames per second (which is still only around 3%) at 1280x1024, although both boards still give stellar performance.

Throw AA back into the mix and the Galaxy GeForce 7600 GS pulls level once again.