Introduction

It's always interesting to see how rapidly a well-established situation in the world of 3D graphics cards can change. Take last year, for example. Despite the obvious success (with many differences, granted) of the new high-end architectures and cards launched by Nvidia and AMD, for months we complained about the absence of midrange or mainstream cards worthy of the name. This was especially due to the weakness of the Radeon HD 2600 and GeForce 8600, and the high price of the GeForce 8800 GTS 320 MB.

Yet all it took was Nvidia's launch of its GeForce 8800 GT in late October to release a flood of graphics cards, separated in price by only a handful of dollars, any of which eclipsed - in terms of performance/features/price ratios - the entry-level and high-end cards from each maker Compare Prices on GeForce Video Cards. In fact, it got to the point where we'd completely lost our bearings and the situation bordered on the ridiculous, with a plethora of names and ultra-limited series: GeForce 8800 GT 256 MB, 8800 GT 512 MB, 8800 GT 1 GB, 8800 GTS 512 MB, 8800 GS, Radeon HD 3850 256 MB, HD 3850 512 MB, Radeon HD 3870, etc. Now the GeForce 9600 GT has to be added to that list. Is it just another version of the G92 - the same graphics processor all the GeForce cards listed above are based upon - or is it a real, new GPU to introduce the GeForce 9 generation of Nvidia graphics cards?

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