This is an absolutely spectacular time to be a PC gamer. The slew of top-notch anticipated games hitting stores shelves is practically unprecedented, including, Crysis, Unreal Tournament 3 and the Orange Box trio of goodness. However, this may not be the best time to own a dated graphics card. The latest generation of high-end graphics cards brought with it pretty much twice the performance of previous high-end cards, and to add insult to injury, these GPU's added DirectX 10 class features that today's games are starting to exploit. If you have a GeForce 7900 or Radeon X1900 series, you may not be able to drink in all the eye candy of the latest games at reasonable frame rates. - TheTechReport

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT G92 Graphics Card Review

In recent years, graphics processor transistor budgets have been ballooning at a rate even faster than Moore's Law, and that has led to some, um, exquisitely plus sized chips. This fall's new crop of GPU's looks to be something of a corrective to that trend, and the G92 is a case in point. This chip is essentially a die shrink of the G80 graphics processor that powers incumbent GeForce 8800 series graphics cards. The G92 adds some nice new capabilities, but doesn't double up on shader power or anything quite that earth shaking. Atleast none we would expect. But after seeing the benchmarks, well...

Another area where the GeForce 8800 GT may be sporting a bit of trimmed down G92 functionality is in the ROP partitions. These sexy little units are responsible for turning fully processed and shaded fragments into full blown pixels. They also provide much of the chip's anti-aliasing grunt, and in NVIDIA's GeForce 8 series architecture, each ROP has a 64-bit interface to video memory. The G80 packs six ROP partitions, which is why the full blown GeForce 8800 GTX has a 384-bit path to memory and the sawed-off GTS has a 320-bit memory interface. We don't know how many ROP's the G92 has lurking inside, but the GT uses only four.

The GeForce 8800 GT does a very convincing imitation of the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB when running the latest games, even at high resolutions and quality settings, with anti-aliasing and high quality texture filtering. Its G92 GPU has all of the GeForce 8800 series goodness we've come to appreciate in the past year or so, including DirectX 10 support, coverage sampled anti-aliasing, and top-notch overall image quality. The card is quiet and draws relatively little power compared to its competitors, and it will only occupy a single slot. That's a stunning total package, sort of what it would be like if Jessica Biel had a brain.

With pricing between $199-249, we find it hard to recommend anything else especially since we found generally playable settings at the highest widescreen resolution in some of the most intensive new games. We expect we may see some more G92 based products popping up in the coming weeks or months, but for most folks, this will be the version to have. The one potential fly in the ointment for the 8800 GT is its upcoming competition from AMD.