Not even the "forces" at NVIDIA’s Austin Texas Office could prevent us from bringing you early benchmarks on the company’s pending GeForce 8800GT – a card that will quickly alienate those who have recently bought either a 8800GTS or an 8600-series. The reason is simple – it’s a die-shrunk G80-class GPU with performance near the GTX and priced at well under $300 dollars. As you'll see from our performance graphs, this card does define the perfect balance of performance, power consumption and price; so well in fact, that we can see it easily become an industry-defining product in no time at all.
NVIDIA’s naming scheme for its fall line-up is very confusing and in fact is rather stupid. I’m not sure why they’d market a “GT” which is faster than a “GTS”. You can expect to see the GTS models quickly go end-of-life and I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see a price move on the GTX down a bit to be more in line with the GT otherwise the sales of it will be hampered as well.
Under the hood of the chip is a 65Nanometer GPU with 128 stream processors, however, 16 of them are disabled to allow NVIDIA and its add-in board partners a much higher yield of chips and also helps to keep the prices at bay.
The board we’re looking at in this early preview is one that’s configured with 512MB of RAM and we fully expect to see 256MB and possible a 1GB version later this year.
With the recent Crysis demo, NVIDIA knows the sheer amount of hype and gaming nirvana it will will bring to the market makes for the perfect timing of a product launch like this and from the looks of it, the 8800GT is primed and pumped, ready to rock.
Conclusion:
In all honesty, we'd really have a hard time recommending any other card than the 8800GT for purchase at this time – not even the GTX. Its price, performance and power use make the GTX look like a relic. Moving to the 65nm process has really paid some nice dividends for both NVIDIA and those whom are seeking the best graphic card out right now.
Some may rag on the 8800GT since it doesn’t have DX10.1 support but until we know of a game that’s worth buying which supports 10.1, We certainly wouldn’t worry to much about it and at this point would far from consider it to be a deal-breaker at all.
There are online merchants who already have product for sale, for example, ZipZoomFly has one right now for $279 – no matter how you stack it, the 8800GT is one great buy. Look for a full review once we get a boxed retail unit from one of the leading add-in board makers.
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