New Nvidia 3D cards thin-slice the market, deliver strong performance
ATI and Nvidia are thin-slicing the hyper-competitive graphics card market to the point of consumer confusion.
It's certainly not a bad thing that the new $349 (give or take, but more likely give) Nvidia Geforce 8800 GTS delivers comparable performance to last year's $500-plus
We'll point you to Anandtech and PC Perspective for the blow-by-blow performance charts. The gist is that the 512MB GeForce 8800 GTS is faster than both the older 8800 GTS cards and competitive with the 8800 GTX due to a new chip design (code-named G92) that uses a 65 nanometer manufacturing process. The result is increased power efficiency compared with the older chips' 90 nano and 80 nano processes, and higher core and memory clock speeds.
We're less sure about the price-performance of the 256MB 8800 GT. If you can find it for its suggested $199 price tag, it seems like a good buy. And while it seems to be faster than the $179 256MB