GeForce 8800 GT 512MB SLI review - Page 1 - Introduction

2x GeForce 8800 GT 512MB & SLI
Attack of the clones

Greetings and welcome my fellow guru's .. and welcome to the beginning of the silly season. It's an exciting time isn't it ? Geforce 8800 GT, ATI's RV670, AMD's Phenom, new enthusiast mainboards from both AMD-ATI and NVIDIA. What is the common denominator you ask ? Well .. that would be you guys. As you guys buy the cool new toys to do the one thing we all love doing so much, eeuhm, well the second thing we love to do so much ;) .. gaming on that nice DIY PC. This year, specifically this season is big with all the gaming titles being released. Who ever stated that PC gaming was dead or that Consoles would annihilate PC Gaming ? PC gaming has never been bigger than it is today, and this fall 254 game titles will be released ...  yes 254. You better start thinking about a graphics card upgrade if needed, and this is where we land at the premises of NVIDIA.

Today we'll show you a product review based on NVIDIA's latest newborn, the (and for some reason I suspect you knew this already) GeForce 8800 GT. Well, let's just re-phrase that to NVIDIA latest product based on a smaller 0.065µ TSMC silicon production.

See, this card was firstly rumored to be the GeForce 8700 GT. But hey .. NVIDIA faced a bit of a challenge. If you are arming an updated silicon with 112 Shader processors and an optional 512MB of memory, chances then are that such a product will perform just as well as their current high-end range graphics cards. Obviously this is what happened ... and that's good for us as today they are introducing a high-end performing product in slightly above the mid-range price range. See the GeForce 8800 GT series of graphics cards are all about bang for bucks, and with silly season coming up NVIDIA hopefully have stocked their board-partners sufficiently as this product is going to be a popular one under that Christmas tree. Oh yeah baby.

So what we are looking at today is the 8800 GT. A product that should (and will) replace that somewhat handicapped 8800 320MB GTS, not only in performance yet also in price. Honestly, that 320 MB 8800 GTS ever since the beginning was my sweet spot graphics cards wise; yet the moment DX10 games became available, it also became more appearant that DX10 is utilizing the framebuffer quite extensively. Mark my words, when DX10 actually becomes popular, your graphics adapter is best off with 512MB memory or higher. It makes a lot of sense, the shader code is much more complex and thus longer, the texture limit sizes are bumped up .. and we as gamers demand more and more eye candy from our games which in the end requires a shitload of computational muscle. Hey, we demand the best gaming experience ever for our money, so the toll we set on the gaming and graphics industry is and should be high.

The 512MB 8800 GT will fill a gap, a gap that the 320MB model has set. Yet due to it's lower pricing (199 to 259 USD) will compete directly with the 8600 GTS, which is interesting as the 8800 GT will annihilate that graphics card performance wise. Do expect to see the prices in mid-range (GeForce 8600 series) collapse due to this as quite honestly, I do not see a point for you guys to buy a 8600 GT or GTS any longer if you budget allows it.

Other than the number of shader processors, a move to a smaller fabrication, there really isn't a heap of new stuff feature wise opposed to the GeForce series 8 product line, you could say it's a clone of what we've already seen. That doesn't mean nothing changed though, oh certainly not my fellow frag-meister. Next page please.