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BFG GeForce 8800 GTS Video Card |
So you want a DirectX 10 Video card but you don’t want to sell a kidney? The BFG GeForce 8800 GTS might be for you. Not that this video card is cheap. The retail price is around $500 dollars. Its only cheap when you compare it to a card like the ASUS EN8800 GTX.
So what does five hundred bucks get you? A pretty good video card, that’s what.
While the GTX model mentioned above has 768 MB of memory (wow) this card only has 640 MB. It has a narrower memory path than the GTX. That means that fewer bites can transfer from the memory to the processor at one time.
The GTS does support SLI. But spending a cool grand on two 8800 GTS’s might seem like overkill at this point. You can also enable AA and HDR lighting at the same time. This is something you could not do with Nvidia’s 7XXX series. Also edge enhancement and noise reduction can be enabled for video playback. Anisotropic filtering is better then it was in the 7XXX series.
Benchmarks from several source show that this card has some serious horse power. Tom’s Hardware has an article showing the results of the 8800 versus ATI’s Goliath the X1950XTX in the game F.E.A.R. As you can see once you turn up the quality settings like AA and AF the 8800 cards really shine.
The only problem now is the lack of DirectX 10 games. Considering that Windows Vista is not widely available this might not be a big issue as of yet. However, once you have Vista in hands you may wonder when the DirectX 10 games are going to show up. That’s a question we can’t answer yet.
Stats:
| GPU: | NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS |
| BUS: | PCI Express |
| Memory | 640MB GDDR3 |
| Core Clock: | 500MHz |
| Shader Clock: | 1200MHz |
| Memory Clock: | 1600MHz |
| Stream Processors: | 96 |
| Texure Fill Rate: | 24 billion/sec |
| Memory Bandwidth: | 64GB/sec |
| Shader Model: | 4.0 |
| DirectX: | 10 |
| OpenGL: | 2.0 |
| DVI-I: | 2 |
| HDTV + TV Out | 1 |
| RAMDACs | Dual 400MHz |
| HDCP Support | Yes |
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“The only problem now is the lack of DirectX 10 games. Considering that Windows Vista is not widely available this might not be a big issue as of yet. However, once you have Vista in hands you may wonder when the DirectX 10 games are going to show up. That’s a question we can’t answer yet.”
You may also wonder when the Vista drivers for the 8800 cards are going to show up. The cards have been out for months, and Vista has been available via various channels since November, but there are still no Vista drivers available for 8800 cards. No beta, no final, no nothing - zip, zilch, nada. Until those drivers are released, you’ve got a $500 Standard VGA adapter under Windows Vista.