The arrival of the G80, successor to the dominating 7 series GeForce cards, is finally coming to a high end computer store near you next week. Should you wet your pants over this? Sort of. The DirectX-10 capable monstrosity is well worth the wait -- with 16X native Anti-Aliasing and a stunning 54% performance boost than ATI's best card, there is simply no better consumer-grade hardware to run your PC games. Keep in mind these tests were run in 1600x1200 in both 4x AA and 16x AA:
Half Life 2: Lost Coast loves the GeForce 8800GTX. Here the GeForce 8800GTX is able to show significant performance gains over AMD’s ATI Radeon X1950 XTX—approximately 92%.
Quake 4 shows similar gains as Half Life 2: Lost Coast too, an approximate 92% improvement.
Prey is based on the same game engine as Quake 4. However, Prey shows smaller performance differences between the GeForce 8800GTX and ATI Radeon X1950 XTX, albeit its still 60%.
You have to give it up to Nvidia for delivering yet another huge leap in gaming performance. Not only that, but you can SLI-link three of these bad boys together. However, this sexy monstrosity may have some trouble turning heads. With the launch of Next-Gen consoles around the corner, the release of this product is a godsend to PC gaming companies ... but is it too late? Do you care enough to wait outside in the cold for Compusa to open? (insert crickets)
While there are some excellent PC games are coming down the pipe shortly, but nothing warrants a serious hardware upgrade like Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 did a few years ago. We needed hardcore SLI graphics for those games. This year? We can get by. Not only that, but there is no shortage of sexy gaming goods this holiday season, and at
$600-$700 it's not exactly a casual upgrade. Then again, the price isn't that much different from existing high end gaming cards which should drop in value after this is released -- and should soon give budget gamers a long awaited break on high end 7 series cards.
For more info on this wondrous hardware, check out
Slashdot (priceless commentary abound -- do you want some PC with that video card?) and
more pictures and benchmarks on DailyTech. If you decide to pick one up you better check your power supply and bank account -- a single card requires a 450 watt power supply, so you're going to need a serious PS and each card consumes 300 watts even when it's idle. Ouch.
I'll open this up for discussion -- any plans on picking one of these bad boys up or do you have other priorities with your greenbacks?
Contest:
8:46 PM on 11.05.2006
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