NVIDIA Corp has unveiled it’s latest 8 series GPU, the NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT. The 8800GT will be available in computer stores everywhere starting today, available in 256MB and 512MB flavours.
The 8800GT looks to be NVIDIA’s answer to cries for a high performance card that could play the latest DirectX 10 games without costing an arm and a leg, and with prices starting at $199 for the 256MB model and $259 for the 512MB model, NVIDIA certainly looks to have delivered.
The 8800GT will feature 112 stream processors, each individually clocked at 1.5GHz and a 256-bit memory interface running at 900MHz. The 8800 GT is also designed for the new PCI Express 2.0 bus standard, but don’t worry; it is backwards compatible with PCI-E 1.1 so you won’t need to run out and buy a new motherboard. When motherboards with PCI-E 2.0 support arrive, NVIDIA customers should see an increase in performance from their cards, as PCI-E 2.0 doubles the bus standard’s bandwidth from 2.5 Gbit/s to 5 Gbit/s.
As always though, I’m not one to trust companies when it comes to talking about their own new products. Obviously they want customers to buy their product instead of the competitors product and quite often the promised performance is lacking compared to real-world performance. This time though, it looks like NVIDIA have really delivered the goods, as can be seen in these extremely impressive benchmark results from the good people at TweakTown:
From the above benchmarks it is pretty clear that NVIDIA is on a winner with the 8800GT, with the card easily beating out the best ATI has to offer except in some of the super high resolution tests, which brings me to my next point.
If you are upgrading your computer and currently have, or are looking to buy a monitor between 19" and 28" then the 8800GT 512MB is a great investment. If, however, you currently have or are looking to buy a 30" monitor then it would be wise to go for an 8800GTX, an 8800 Ultra, or just wait until the new year for NVIDIA’s next major offerings. [Ed’s note: chances are you can afford it if you’ve got such a mondo-sized screen. ‘sup Richie Rich?] The 8800GT is an absolutely stellar offering and if they can keep this up the future is looking bright for NVIDIA. It certainly will be interesting to see what ATI offers up in return.
[via NVIDIA]
