For the past year or so, gamers have been in a tough spot. There have been options for those who want decent DirectX 9 performance, but newer games are more demanding and some of the affordable cards in the sub-$300 price range aren’t delivering great experiences anymore. Then there’s DirectX 10. DX10 games are finally starting to show up in force, and the newest ones like Crysis and Hellgate: London show marked improvements over the DX9 mode.The performance hit for DX10 is usually pretty strong, and the only cards that can run these games in DX10 mode at a decent clip cost $300-$500. Most gamers want a Radeon 2900XT or GeForce 8800 GTS, GTX, or Ultra, but they can’t afford it. Those cards are very large and suck down a lot of power, as well. The sweet spot is $200-250, where cards aren’t over 10″ long and don’t devour so many watts that you need a new case and power supply just to operate them. For a year, there has been no viable option in this price range for the latest and greatest DX10 graphics cards.
Until now.
The new GeForce 8800 GT delivers kick-ass DirectX 9 performance and surprisingly good DirectX 10 performance in a card that measures only 9″ long, occupies a single slot, draws a reasonable amount of power, and costs between $200-250. The fact that it out-performs and out-features our previous favorite graphics card, a nearly $400 GeForce 8800 GTS, is nothing short of amazing. Continued…
I’ve hit a wall recently as my 6800 started dying and games got more and more intense. My machine may have more life in it, but it needed a new video card. And yet, being married I don’t have lots to throw around. I had looked and found a great review on Tom’s Hardware talking about getting the most bang for your buck in video cards. And going from that list I had priced and put on my shopping list a couple ATI cards to replace the failing 6800 on my gamer. Now the problem is, I’ve been an Nvidia head for a long time… so I was hesitant to begin with. And then finding out that last night this card came out. I was glad to see the extremetech review above (You’ve got to read it… the results are good) I was left deciding I needed to save for a good while longer and get myself a decent replacement for it. Anyone want to toss down $250 to get me a new video card?
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