NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX and 8800 GTS: Unified Powerhouses

Performance Summary: NVIDIA's new GeForce 8800 GTS and GTX cards are mighty strong performers. Throughout our entire battery of benchmarks, both cards put up framerates at, or near the top of the charts. The GeForce 8800 GTS outperformed a GeForce 7900 GTX in every test we ran. It did, however, missed the mark set by a Radeon X1950 XTX in a couple of high-resolution tests, and trailed a GeForce 7950 GX2 on a few occasions, but the features and enhanced image quality offered by the 8800 GTS offset any of these results in our opinion.

The GeForce 8800 GTX's performance was for more dominant. In every benchmark we ran, the GeForce 8800 GTX was clearly the best performer, and in some cases it doubled the performance of any of the previous generation, single-GPU powered cards. And it did so with superior image quality. There is simply no currently other consumer level video card that can come close to matching the performance of the GeForce 8800 GTX.

NVIDIA has taken a monumental step forward with the GeForce 8800 GTS and GTX. These new cards are superior to their predecessors in every meaningful way. The G80 GPU's Unified Architecture, with its 128 (GTX) or 96 (GTS) stream processors delivered outstanding performance in every application we tested, whether it was based on DirectX or OpenGL.  Not to mention the fact that the G80 GPU also supports all DirectX 10 features as well.

The new Lumenex Engine also provides many real-world, tangible benefits.  The G80's new capabilities improve upon the previous generation of GPUs in terms of anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering quality, and NVIDIA can now claim full support for HDR with AA, something they couldn't say with the G70. The GPU's full 10-bit display pipeline is also a welcomed feature that will pay even more dividends once next-gen 10-bit displays become available. NVIDIA also promises that the raw floating point performance of the G80 will usher in an era of high-performance physics processing on the GPU, and CUDA will eventually bring even more capabilities to the G80 as highly parallel, data intensive applications are compiled for execution on the GPU.

The GeForce 8800 GTX will be available immediately from multiple e-tail outlets for approximately $599. The GeForce 8800 GTS will be available right away as well, for about $449. Considering their performance, new features and enhanced PureVideo capabilities, the GeForce 8800 GTX and GTS are sure to have many hardcore enthusiasts chomping at the bit. And we're told you won't have to worry about the recall that has been in the news the last few days. In fact, NVIDIA sent this over in an effort to put potential customer's minds at ease:

We can say that the samples we evaluated functioned perfectly throughout our testing, and we suspect even if a few faulty boards make it into the hands of consumers, they'll be repaired or replaced immediately.

So there you have it. The first fully unified, DX10 compliant graphics cards have arrived and its clear they're vastly superior to their predecessors.  The GeForce 8800 GTX and GTS are the real-deal, and there's nothing else on the market that even comes close to touching them in terms of features and performance. These babies are HOT and they rock.

Extreme Performance Unified Architecture Full DX10 Support Enhanced Image Quality New AA Modes Better Anisotropic Filtering SLI Support	Hefty Power Consumption Runs Hot GTX Requires 2 Power Leads

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