Wednesday, October 31, 2007

All good things come to those who wait

Oh sweet holy of holy holies. Bestoweth upon me with great benevolence your glorious powers of exceptional GPU performance.

How did this happen? Who! What? When?

Was I walking around with my head in the sand all this time? How did NVIDIA manage to sneak this new line of graphic cards by me? I've been fixated on the 8800GTS, GTX, Ultra and Black Pearl, but just yesterday I learned that there's another line of the 8800s coming out. It looks like they just launched.

Insert your dork comment aimed in my direction here.

Why is this so cool? Well, NVIDIA first put out the 8600 series to try and capture the market space that didn't want to fork over upwards of $400 for a card, but the 8600s aren't all that spectacular, especially when considering the new games that are coming out, or when considering the bloated needs of the new Vista OS.

The 8800GT line is going to be the sweet spot for gamers who want the DirectX10 capability (and who are brave enough to be running Vista without SP1), who want to be able to run all their games with high settings so as to take advantage of all the texturing, shading, and steady framerate, but don't want to drop 4 bills to make it happen. Games like Crysis, BioShock, and Unreal Tournament 3 are going to devour older cards. Transistors and subpar boards will lay strewn in the wake of these resource hungry beasts, which, if tamed, will grant the player with an unparalleled experience.

It's not surprising to see that practically all vendors are presently sold out of these cards.

BCCHardware has a great review of the 8800GT compared against the 8600GTS, and Tech Report has another one comparing the 8800GT to the big boys, although I haven't yet seen the card priced between $199 and $249, but from the vendors I've seen it's close.

Here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus...

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