been reading up a bit on them, and apparently they're quite the technical revolution. It's unusual for the graphics card industry but they use a new chipset build and aren't just an improved version of an older build. And the results are pretty mindblowing judging by benchmarks and reviews of the 8800 GTX: it eats the 7800 GTX and its ATi counterpart the x1950xtx ALIVE. You have to keep in mind that these cards aren't exactly hobo cards and were top of the line before the 8800 came along.

Even the budget version, the 8800 GTS beats the other two in pretty much every setup. The only drawback about the entire party is that the graphical power is so amazing that you need an equally hardcore CPU to bring it out to the fullest. In pretty much every review I read they focus a lot on the fact that a CPU-limited pc may only see a fraction of the power of these monsters. One saw a loss of up to 50% speed gain when they put the card in a box with a 3.2 GHz CPU. Of course, the cards are still faster than anything on the market on these systems...but you won't see the things you see on the high-end ones: 65% speed gain in FEAR, 130% (!!!) speed gain in Company of Heroes and so on. Freaking unbelievable in this day and age.

Oh, the 8800 is also the first directx 10 card. Of course you'll need Vista to use directx 10 and that's not something most of us are gonna get soon so we won't see the "full" power anytime soon but meh. And of course, the 8800 GTX costs 600 bucks. =) the budget one 400. The good news though is that this evolution is bound to make the old monsters (7900 GTX) dirt cheap soon enough. Three cheers for technological advancements!

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/11/29/ ... stest_cpu/

P.S. I got my information from other reviews and benchmarks than that one, in case you wonder where I got some of the things I said in this post. Not gonna type out an entire test article.

Are they paying you commision? Lol.

I was looking at these.

I want the next PC I build to be uber. I also want that new physics processor, is it PhysX? I can't remember. The joys of being at work. My brain has melted.

They released a 300$ version too.



Gamespot article

fyi, don't waste your money on a Aegia physics card, not yet at least. Not until it's more universally supported. Nvidia is supposed to be rolling a physics processor into their graphics processor or something, so a separate physics card may end up dead before it's fully born.

Anyway, I plan on building a new pc, probably when I get my tax return. One of the things I getting is a dx10 compatible card, preferably a really high end one (8800gtx). That's a hell of a price, but man.... anyway, depends how I'm doing financially I suppose.

For anyone building a new box, I wouldn't recommend using any box that doesn't have dx10 support.... or if you ever upgrade to Vista for gaming you'll be regretting it.

Illuminate, what do you mean by DX10 support. IE mobo CPU?

no, graphics card. Only some graphics cards support directX version 10. At this point, only nvidia's 8000 series does. Directx 10 is the new version of directx that comes with Windows Vista. It's supposed to offer improved speed, improved prettiness, etc etc etc.. basically Microsoft completely rewrote directx and how it works with the O/S in Vista. One of the few times an upgrade will probably cause you to turn faster.

So if you have a geforce7900gtx, it'll be running in directx 9 mode under Vista, since it doesn't support dx10. So don't waste your money. Unless you don't plan on upgrading to Vista, or if you don't mind buying a new card when you do upgrade to Vista.

I wouldn't know why I should want to upgrade to Vista.

I think ill be just fine with my two 6800 ultras atleast for a while.

hehe, you'll be fine for now. But there're some VERY nice games being developed for dx10. Like the new Far Cry game. Google it and check out some of the videos to see. The graphics are phenomenal. It'll still have dx9 support I'm sure, but dx10 is a major evolutionary step.

So, anyway, it's probably not going to matter much for at least 6 months, but eventually you will want a dx10 card and Vista if you want to run the most badass titles.

For those lazy people who don't really wanna look it up, imagine the difference between most FPSs and Oblivion. Then take that and increase again for the differences in dx10.

Dx10 will also offer a uniform package of graphics card characteristics btw. In the past (and in the present really) the manufacturers were pretty much allowed to add/lose any feature they liked on their cards which caused a lot of problems for game developers because they couldn't be a 100% certain about the hardware when building the game. With directx10, all manufacturers are supposed to have their cards come with the same characteristics...will make it a lot easier for the games developers and better for us.

And Mole, I'm not the marketing guy and I don't even like Nvidia but the performance these cards are putting out it at the top of their abilities pretty is mind-blowing if you ask me.

If I were a rich man...I'd build a top-end rig with monster CPU and 8800 GTX. It'd be about 1700€.

heh....yea, well, I'm not going to be doing THAT. I hope nvidia releases something badass soon so the 8800gtx isn't so freakin' expensive.

I'm sure the 8800 GTX will drop soon enough anyway. What about a SLI build with two 7800 GTX's? But that's not Directx 10.

7900gtx buddy. And I think you'd be better off getting an 8800gtx rather than 2 7900gtx's. But who knows. How about you buy a couple test rigs and tell us which is superior.

Two 8800gtx's? hehe

yep, you could do that. I wonder what kind of power supply and cooling you'd need for that. Not to mention what kind of processor wouldn't bottleneck it.