With a number of highly-anticipated DirectX 10 titles such as Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 set to hit retail shelves before the end of the year, it is likely that many gamers will be looking to upgrade their gaming rigs in order to take advantage of all the eye candy these games have to offer. With that in mind, Nvidia today is releasing the GeForce 8800 GT, bringing near-8800GTX power to the $199-$259 GPU segment.
The GeForce 8800 GT is being manufactured using 65nm technology, not only shrinking the size of the circuitry but reducing the overall power consumption as well. The 8800 GT boasts 112 stream processors, each clocked at 1,500MHz, while the core runs at 600MHz and the 512MB of GDDR3 RAM reach an effective 1,8GHz on a 256-bit interface. As you can see in our "Crysis demo performance in-depth" article, the GeForce 8800 GT provides a better gameplay experience than the GeForce 8800 GTS for less money.
This is probably the video card that many have been waiting for before jumping on the DirectX 10 bandwagon, but before you run out and buy one be aware that Nvidia will be launching a new GTS card on November - probably at a higher price, though. You can expect TechSpot's GeForce 8800 GT review later this week. In the meantime, you can read some other reviews at AnandTech, Tom's Hardware and The Tech Report.