The GeForce 9600 GT should be the first card from the 9000 series to surface (right away) and it's time to get some 3DMark numbers on it. Using a quite powerful Core 2 QX9650 on an Asus Maximus Formula X38, we obtain something very akin to what the 8800GS can muster. These results are good news for you, because it was known that the 8800GS wouldn't last. It's this new graphics card that has to fill this market sector.

The 9600 works at 650/1625/1800MHz (core/shader/memory) and it's G94-300 based (not G92). If 3DMark doesn't cut it for you, here you will find a lot more: from technical specifications comparisons (between 9600GT, 8800GS, 8600GTS and Radeon HD 3850), to fully detailed chip surface measurements. Of course, the game list for the benchmarks is long, and not only includes 3DMark 2006 Ver. 110, but: Call Of Juarez, Lost Planet: Extreme Condition, BIOSHOCK, Company Of Heroes Ver. 1.70, Crysis, Need For Speed: ProStreet, F.E.A.R, Unreal Tournamant 3 Demo and Colin McRace: DIRT.

In this case, "only" a QX6800 on a Gigabyte GA-P35-DQ6 with two gigabytes of memory and Windows Vista (for DirectX 10 support) form the system setup.

Link: ExpReview.

The mainstream graphics cards market is really heating up, with both nVidia's 9600GT and AMD/ATI's RV635 promising more frames at a lower price point.

It looks like the 8600GT will have a more than worthy successor but, can we say the same for the HD2600? Compared to the equally clocked version (the 2600XT), the answer may be "no". Even with a reduction in the fabrication process from 65 to 55nm, the new GPU gives very little in the performance area to justify the raise in power consumption.

Leaving aside the results for the HD 3670 256MB in Half Life 2 Episode 2 @ 1600x1200 without AA, which should be more driver related than anything else, the frame rates are very close to label the new product as a success. Power consumption could also be explained by the chip being an engineering sample, we leave the conclusions up to you before further results are published.

Link: ExpReview.

Nvidia took advantage of CES to officially announce, yet again, their next step in SLI technology. I guess that makes for a formal engagement, but no wedding date folks. They plan for an entire family of GPUs and compatible chipsets to be made available this year, starting with the nForce 780a SLI, nForce 750a SLI and nForce 730a for AMD processors (expected right away), then the 8200 series with DirectX 10 support and, in Q2, products for the Intel platform.

The people at Bit-tech talked to nVidia representatives about some of their products for 2008, Hybrid SLI in particular. What they found out is that, by summer, all nVidia based motherboards (be they for Intel or AMD processors) will incorporate a GPU. With one of those boards, a Geforce graphics card and Windows Vista, you will be able to use both HybridPower and GeForce Boost.

HybridPower, requires the monitor to be plugged in to the motherboard's VGA output and puts a question mark on multi-monitor configurations. At the same time, all the bandwith PCI-Express 2.0 provides will be welcome to move all the information on the frame buffer to and from main system memory. Regarding GeForce Boost, nVidia said they won't be implementing it on high end graphics cards anytime soon (you don't want your almighty 8800 trailing behind because of that IGP snail) but it will work with graphics cards already on sale like the 8500 GT and the 8400 GS (HybridPower won't, though).

Link: X-bit labs.

If you thought that the GeForce 7950 GX2 was big, think again, because the 9800 GX2 makes it look like a RAM module. Even though the 8800 has been shrunk to 65nm, this SLI-on-a-card sandwiched configuration turns out to be even more massive than anything before.

The card will have 1 GB of memory and will basically be two-in-one: two printed circuit boards, two graphics processing units, 512 MB of memory for each GPU and two DVI outputs. You really must see the pictures, because (out of context) it looks more suited as a brick in a wall than a top of the line PC component.

Link: HardOCP.

The Radeon HD 3850 was too good a graphics card in it's price range for nVidia not to give an answer to. The 8800GS gets to be that answer and (despite it's name) the substitute to the 8600GT in the ever so important market of the mainstream GPUs. It's a very similar situation to the one we faced when the 7900GS came out, it's direct competitor was the 7600GT and the next generation was just around the corner. Now, nVidia repeats the move by launching a card that will get replaced when the 9600GT starts being sold just a few weeks from now.

What you have here is basically a 8800GT with almost every spec turned down. The only characteristic that doesn't get axed is the memory bus at 192 bits. Core and memory frequency will be around those of the 8800GT (600/1800 MHz).

Only three games and 3DMark are tested, but against the slower version of the 8800GS (575/1700 MHz), the performance card from nVidia only edges the new offering by 26.97%. That's not much, looking at the price difference.

Link: Expreview.

Another comparison, this time pitting two mainstream graphics cards against each other. It can be argued that the 8800GT is a better buy than the GTS, but if that's your opinion, you can easily extrapolate results, as this one is close enough to the GT to be a point of reference. In any case, the 3850 is in a different price range than the 8800GT.

Generally speaking, nVidia has the better card, if we look at the framerates from FEAR and Supreme Commander it wins clearly. On the other hand, the performance of AMD/ATI under DX10 (Crysis) and OpenGL (Doom 3) gets to be double of that from the 8800GTS (with specific resolutions and detail settings).

Really, the market is full of options for every budget right now. With the Radeon HD 3850 256MB below the €150 mark, the Radeon HD 3870 512MB just below €200 and even some GeForce 8800GT 512MB for not much more than that, the chance to give yourself a present would be unbeatable if we only had the 9600GT here.

Link: HardwareLogic.

One of the most widely used weapons to "trick" graphics cards buyers has been, almost from the inception of 3D accelerators, to bloat them with memory. As soon as it became cheaper to double the amount of on-board RAM, rather than getting a better GPU, the market was flooded with this kind of nonsense products.

To avoid such manufacturer's traps, the best method has always been to read reviews that give you the information needed for each specific graphics card and the right amount of memory it should carry to function propertly. Another posibility, for several years now, was to automatically discard 512MB+ configurations for anything else than the "ultra" (or, more recently, GTX) models. It didn't take much effort to figure out that the 9200 SE only needed so much, but where do we trace the line?

Right now general rules are difficult to stick with. For example, a Radeon HD 3850 may do reasonably well with 256MB, but another card from almost the same category like the 8800 GT goes down hard if we cripple it by halving it's memory. The XFX 8800 GT 256MB Alpha Dog Edition, with (more or less) the same characteristics as a 8800 GT 512MB, only gets good framerates under UT3. If you play any other game, you will be left in the dust. With the next generation of games appearing on the shelves, 512mb is really the default minimum you should consider for those high res polygons.

Link: PC Perspective.

With the Radeon HD 3800, AMD/ATI got to be the first that had a Shader Model 4.1 compliant graphics card in the shelves. Among the upgrades it incorporates, Global Illumination "shines". This technique:

"[...] can deliver ray trace quality effects including indirect lighting, color bleeding, soft shadows, refraction, and high quality glossy reflections to a scene."

Below, you'll find a link to a screenshot from an AMD demo that illustrates this subject. I would rather say that it exaggerates this new DirectX weapon. It's unclear if games will be able to implement this feature in a way that's so dramatic as you can see here but, if they do, at that same moment, Geforce 8 cards will have their days numbered. The fact that AMD hasn't considered DX 10.1 as a basic marketing strategy may indicate that such games are nowhere to be seen just yet, though.

Link:  Tom's Hardware.

Club 3D has a new 8600 GT with 512MB of DDR2. Being slightly more expensive than the Sparkle Geforce 8600 GT 256MB (GDDR3), let's see if size matters (we compare 1000 MHz against 1400MHz for the card with half the memory). An XFX 7600 GT 256MB is also added, which is always welcome, specially when you can browse through so many games.

The bench computer was built around a Core 2 E6400 @ 2.8Ghz on an Intel 975x “bad axe” motherboard with 2Gb of memory. Operating system was Windows XP SP2 and drivers were Forceware 163.71. Games:

• Team Fortress 2
• TES: Oblivion
• Colin McRae DIRT
• Rainbow Six Las Vegas
• Prey
• FEAR
• STALKER
• Quake Wars
• Supreme Commander
• BioShock
• Call of Duty 4 (demo)
• Unreal Tournament 3 (demo)

Using resolutions from 1024x768 to 1600x1200, and different quality settings for each game, it's quite clear that it's better to have 256 MB of fast memory. Luckly for Club 3D, Arctic Cooling's heatsink desing (similar to the Accelero S2) could prove to be a good selling point.

Link: madshrimps.

Video Cards:
GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB
GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB
GeForce 8600 GTS 256MB
Radeon 2900 XT 512MB
Radeon 2600 XT 256MB

Games:
Bioshock
Call of Juarez
Company of Heroes
Lost Planet: Extreme Condition
World in Conflict Demo

The objective of this article is triple. First, using the highest settings possible for each game (regardless of the image quality improvement a particular stting might have) they compare performance under a considerable amount of strain with DX10 exclusive image quality options enabled. Conclusion: in all the games (except for Bioshock) DX9 is playable but they take a huge performance hit when switching to DX10.

Second, in an apples-to-apples situation they test if the promise of DX10's improved rendering proves to be faster than DX9 rendering. Conclusion: when the DX10 exclusive graphics options were disabled only Lost Planet experienced a performance improvement. At least, you can say there's potential here.

Third, an image quality comparison of DX9 rendering and DX10 rendering was performed with a GeForce 8800 GTX. Conclusion: right now, DX10 doesn't offer a big image quality improvement. Not enough given the framerate loss.

Link: Hot Hardware.