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Originally Posted by Sycho
what about 1920x1080 with little or no AA? I've noticed on my 19" CRT that 1920x1080 with no AA looks good, even though there are a few jaggies, I don't mine them to much.
As a note, it was hitman 2 that I ran at 1920x1080(i) on my 5200, and it still ran smooth as butter.
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let me put it this way.
i have a p4 3.2 ghz, 1gb ram, and a 6800GT, which is a lot faster than the 6800 (50% more fillrate, like 80% more memory bandwidth, double the ram, plus an additional vertex shader unit).
at max detail (all eyecandy on) I can do the following smooth (no drops under 25fps):
doom3 - 1080p no aa, 8xaf
half life 2 - 1080p 4xaa, 8xaf (lost coast hdr addon will probably bump this down to 720p no aa/8xaf)
far cry - 720p no aa, 8xaf
far cry - 1080p 2x aa, 8xaf (hdr disabled)
f.e.a.r. - 720p 4xaa, 8xaf
medal of honor pacific assault - 720p 4xaa/8xaf
world of warcraft - 1080p 4xaa/8xaf
splinter cell chaos theory - 720p no aa/8xaf
splinter cell chaos theory - 1080p 4xaa/8xaf (soft shadows and hdr disabled)
painkiller battle out of hell expansion - 720p 4xaa/8xaf
sims 2 - 1080p 4xaa/8xaf
battlefield 2 - 720p 4xaa/8xaf
So even with a 6800GT I can only do 720p on most new games with all the eyecandy on. Downgrading the lighting (disabling HDR) or shadowing effects (turning off soft shadows) can bump me into 1080p on a couple of games, but that is with a card that is a lot faster than the one you are getting. These are the latest games so they are a lot more trying than Hitman 2, so I think they would beat up the 6800 at 1920x1080. That's not to say you couldn't do it, you'd just have to notch down the effects a lot. But I think the loss of the visual effects will be much greater than the sharpness you'd lose running 720p instead of 1080p... The new realistic lighting and shadowing effects offered by the newer games are very impressive and IMO a much bigger gain than resolution offers. Granted older games I can all play at 1080p no problem... but I assume you're not buying a new gfx card to play older games.
The 6800 will be a massive upgrade for you, as will the 6600GT, so in either case you will likely be very happy. I'd just recommend using 720p because neither card really has the power or memory bandwidth to handle high quality effects at 1920x1080 with the latest games... even my 6800GT doesn't with a lot of them.
You could just snoop around benchmarks - in terms of demand 720p is about equivalent to a standard pc res of 1152x864 while 1080p is about equivalent to a standard pc res of 1600x1200, see where the cards stack up in the games you play... then again benchmarks often don't translate well to playability since they usually measure average fps not min.