NVIDIA 8800 Roundup: The Best of the Best
Eval of the best 8800's you can buy...

Back when a new Intel chipset launch meant excitement and anticipation, we were always impressed by the widespread availability of motherboards based on the new chipset on the day of announcement. These launches with immediate availability were often taken for granted, and it wasn't until we encountered a barrage of paper launches that discussing availability was really ever an issue.

It wasn't too long ago that both ATI and NVIDIA were constantly paper launching new graphics products, but since that unfortunate year both companies have sought to maintain these "hard launches" with immediate retail availability. NVIDIA has done a better job of ensuring widespread availability than ATI, and last week's launch of the GeForce 8800 series is a perfect example of just that.

Weeks before our G80 review went live we were receiving samples of 8800 GTX and GTS GPUs from NVIDIA's board manufacturers, all eager to get their new product out around the time of NVIDIA's launch. It's simply rare that we see that sort of vendor support surrounding any ATI GPU launch these days, and obviously it's a fact that NVIDIA is quite proud of.

The G80 itself is reason enough for NVIDIA to be proud; widespread availability is merely icing on the cake. As we saw in our review of the 681 million transistor GPU, even a single GeForce 8800 GTX is able to outperform a pair of 7900 GTX or X1950 XTX cards running in SLI or CrossFire respectively. The chip is fast and on average an 8800 GTX seems to draw only 8% more power than ATI's Radeon X1950 XTX, so overall performance per watt is quite strong.

The architecture of G80 is built for the future, and as the first DirectX 10 GPU these cards will be used to develop the next-generation of games. Unlike brand new architectures of DirectX past, you don't need newly re-written games to take advantage of G80. Thanks to its unified shader architecture, the massively parallel powerhouse is able to make full utilization of its execution power regardless of what sort of shader code you're running on it.

NVIDIA's timing with the 8800 launch is impeccable, as it is the clear high end choice for PCs this holiday season. With no competition from ATI until next year, NVIDIA is able to enjoy the crown for the remaining weeks of 2006. If you are fortunate enough to be in the market for an 8800-class card this holiday season, we present to you a roundup of some of the currently available GeForce 8800 graphics cards.

Read all about it here courtesy of anandtech.com.

-Eric