by
Dave Altavilla
—
Thursday, February 21, 2008, 09:00 AM EDT
NVIDIA launched the first release of their next generation GeForce 9 GPU architecture today and this time the company decided to come out with a mainstream, more reasonably priced offering first, versus the traditional high-end, pricey flagship boards that are typically showcased for the introduction of a new graphics processor. The new NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT is based on the NVIDIA G94 GPU and is manufactured on a 65nm process with a 64 stream processor architecture. To put that in perspective, NVIDIA’s previous generation mid-range component (the 8600 GT) had half the number of SPs at 32, though due its 65nm process shrink, the 9600 GPU is still quite small thus still cost and power-efficient.
As you'll see in the benchmarks here, the board also offers a fair bang for the buck, given its sub $200 price point. Hit it...