Conclusion

NVIDIA is first out of the gates with a DirectX 10 GPU, and it’s a screamer when it comes to performance. Make no mistake about it, NVIDIA’s GeForce 8800 GTX is the fastest graphics card on the planet right now.

It’s interesting that it’s launching just days ahead of Sony’s next-gen PS3 console, which by the way, is powered by NVIDIA’s RSX GPU. All the buzz in gaming right now surrounds Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PS3 game consoles, but the GPUs in both of these consoles ain’t got nothing on them that can’t be found in the GeForce 8800 GTX’s G80 GPU. It’s got a unified shader architecture just like Xbox 360’s Xenos GPU, and a whopping 128 shading units running at an astounding 1.35GHz! Meanwhile, the RSX GPU inside the PS3 is closer in comparison to NVIDIA’s G70/G71 GPUs found in the GeForce 7800/7900 series than GeForce 8800 GTX, and you saw how the 8800 GTX performed in comparison to NVIDIA’s previous graphics architecture in our benchmarks. It just isn’t close.

And as good as the GeForce 8800 GTX looks today, it’s going to get even better with newer, upcoming drivers. Today’s G80 driver still has some rough edges in it, for instance, we noticed strange anomalies and graphical glitches when running Oblivion with HDR+AA and NVIDIA’s still working out the kinks in Serious Sam 2 with HDR+AA as well. NVIDIA’s aware of these issues and is working hard to correct them, in fact, NVIDIA delivered a driver that they feel has fixed the Oblivion issue just in the past 48 hours, but we haven’t had a chance to test with it yet. Some of the earlier G80 drivers also didn’t scale as well with SLI.

Because of these issues, if you’re buying an 8800 card today, you’ll want to make sure that you download the latest GeForce 8800 driver off NVIDIA’s website rather than relying on the driver that ships with your card, as it’s bound to be a newer driver that resolves some issues. NVIDIA also ran into a problem with an early batch of 8800 GTX cards that had the wrong resistor value. NVIDIA and their board partners however have been working to pull cards from this batch back to be fixed and sent us this statement: Today NVIDIA announced the hard launch and immediate availability of our new flagship GeForce 8800 GPUs. Some recent reports on the web mention a BOM error (wrong resistor value) on initial GeForce 8800 GTX boards. All boards with this problem were purged from the production pipeline. Product on shelves is fully qualified and certified by NVIDIA and its board partners. We and our board partners stand behind these products and back them with our full warranty.

In our opinion, all this is par for the course in this industry. Whenever you’re dealing with an untested, next-generation product there are always bound to be issues. Normally they escape the public eye and are only an issue to reviewers and board partners, however this time things were different and word quickly spread like wildfire online. The bottom line is pretty simple: if you’re looking for all-out performance, there’s nothing faster than the GeForce 8800 GTX, it’s without a doubt the new king of the hill in 3D graphics.

The GeForce 8800 GTS does lag behind GTX pretty considerably in some tests, in fact it’s outpaced by the GeForce 7950 GX2 in some cases and the Radeon X1950 XTX came close in our testing with F.E.A.R. and Call of Duty 2, but it’s too early to say why. Perhaps NVIDIA cut down to many units in its architecture, or perhaps the driver needs a little more fine tuning. Most likely it’s some combination of the two. Considering it’s $450 MSRP is right in line with the current MSRP of the Radeon X1950 XTX, it definitely delivers a little more bang for the buck at current list prices (it remains to be seen what actual street prices will look like).

With the debut of the GeForce 8800 GTX and 8800 GTS, the GeForce 7950 GX2 and GeForce 7900 GTX will slowly go away, while the GeForce 7950 GT and 7900 GS carry over unchanged at $299 and $199 MSRP. If you’re looking for a hot deal, perhaps you may want to follow the pricing on these cards in the coming weeks. It’s beginning to look like ATI’s answer to GeForce 8800, R600, won’t debut until sometime early next year, so NVIDIA’s going to end 2006 in the same #1 performance position they held for most of last year. We’ll be looking into SLI performance next, as we’re eager to see how two GeForce 8800 cards perform together. Stay tuned…