Moore's Law demands it, enthusiasts speculate about it and the head honchos at NVIDIA are probably rubbing their hands in anticipation at the prospects of world domination. In case you haven't guessed, the next evolution in the GeForce 8 series is set to be unleashed today and this new arrival has been predictably dubbed the GeForce 8800 GT. There is an air of inevitability about this new high-end card. A different core from the ones found in the GeForce 8800 series, G92 instead of G80 and a die-shrink. Same old story, you may think and it won't be far off the mark, as it seems to be the tradition among chipmakers to produce a more efficient variant of their architecture. - Hardware Zone

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB PCI Express Review

From a conceptual point of view, the G92 is a hybrid of the G80 and the G84 and/or G86 cores. While the G80 undoubtedly retained superior performance in benchmarks, one feature it lacked compared to its lower end brethren is the presence of NVIDIA's second generation video processor, which took the processing burden off the CPU when decoding high definition video streams, leading to lower CPU utilization rates. Now this dedicated video processor has been embedded into the GeForce 8800 GT core and you'll get the full PureVideo HD deal, meaning that along with VP2, there's also the bitstream processor.

Besides what we have mentioned earlier, the GeForce 8800 GT is also a milestone in being the first consumer graphics card to support the new PCI Express 2.0 specifications. Promising to double the bandwidth from a total of 8GB/s to 16GB/s, this requires a compatible PCI Express 2.0 motherboard to realize its maximum potential but naturally, it is also backwards compatible with the prevalent PCI Express 1.1 standard that all of the other motherboards support today. Whether this will mean anything in practical application is moot at such an early point in time but you can count on more of such cards in the future.

With the holiday season almost upon us, the new releases for PC games are starting to resemble a flood of who's who in the gaming industry. Titles like Gears of Wars, Unreal Tournament 3 and Crysis are slated to be released in the next month or so. More importantly, these are highly anticipated A-list titles DirectX 10 supported games that Microsoft is probably betting the bank on to jumpstart its games for Vista initiative. Similarly for the graphics cards industry, some of these games are the killer applications that everyone is hoping will lead to greater adoption of DirectX 10 hardware.

The contrast is especially stark when you consider the $259 price point that NVIDIA has mandated for the 512MB edition of the GeForce 8800 GT. NVIDIA expects the 256MB versions in the next few weeks, with a recommended price of $199. Meanwhile, retail availability looks good, with stocks already in stores as we speak. For those who don't have large displays, the 256MB edition is adequate, for current games at least. We can't yet write-off the fact that newer games might have much higher frame buffer requirements and for those planning ahead, you would be better off topping up $50 more for the 512MB edition.