Did anyone check out Fudzilla.com today? They got pictures of the GeForce 9600GT and this card is a Quantum leap in performance over the 8600GT. (unlike the nonexistent increase in performance from the 7600GT to the 8600GT which only offered DX10 capability but no extra fraps in DX9 applications)

The 9600GT will compete directly with the ATI 3850 cards. It will have 384MB of onboard 256 bit ram and the sucker scores over 10k on the 3D Mark06. It is built on a 65nm spin off of the G92 (called G94-300) and it going to be super stiff competition for ATI.

This card is expected to be released in Mid-February.

Even if you have no plans to buy from Nvidia wait until 30 days after the 9600GT has been released before buying a card. That should be enough time to allow AMD to drop their prices on the 3850 series to compete with Nvidia.

Here are the details on the GeForce 9600GT. This card looks BAD A$$! Expect very competitive pricing from Nvidia on this one.

The 9600GT story on Fudzilla.com:
http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php? [...] 3&Itemid=1

Pictures of the Geforce 9600GT:
http://en.expreview.com/?p=184

Oh, also the 8800GS cards are coming out also. I imagine they will compete with the 3870 cards.

Gotta Love the Naming.
Just something else to confuse Everybody.

The new 9xxx Series card is now About 6th in Performance.

8800GTX>8800GTS 512mb>8800GT 512mb>8800GTS 640MB>8800GT 256MB>8800GTS 320MB>9600GT

Hey, this is nice that NVIDIA is getting a new card in there, but my god I think they are using a random number generator for naming their new cards.

I think the release of the GeForce 9600GT is real exciting news. The standard for Mid-range cards will now be raised dramatically.

Dell offers a lot of computers with the 8600GT as one of their top graphic options for midrange computers (The $800 to $1,400 price range). Now with the 9600GT coming out this is really going to provide the general public (non-PC builders) with a very strong video cards.

This is great news for the PC gaming community. With dramatically stronger video cards being infused in to the general public this will likely influence game developers to re-invest in to PC gaming and keep the graphics of PC games on the same level of consoles or even better.

Example: Madden 2008 is L-O-N-G overdue for a graphics overhaul on the PC. I am hoping that Madden 2009 for the PC will finally be constructed on the XBOX360 engine. The fact that Peter Moore (formerly of XBOX360 and Games for Windows) is now the big man at EA Sports that may very well happen this year.

Just reminds me of my ATI radeon 9600 I used to run, still have it too somewhere, lol.

Personally I like ATI. I think their Color Quality is better along with their price/performance ratio. But for some reason the Big Guys (like Dell) seem to gear their entire line up towards Nvidia. Nvidia is currently the industry leader and most of the big brands like Dell, HP, Gateway almost buy Nvidia exclusively.

Walk in to a Best Buy, or a Circuit City or Sam's Club and try to find a OEM computer with an ATI card in it. There are almost NONE! Out of 20 computers there may be 1 or 2 with ATI cards. Even on computers with AMD processors.

Now that Both Nvidia and ATI have cards at the same performance level I think potenial exists that the quality of PC gaming is going to increase. (Not that it is bad right now)

The launch is not directly tied in to Madden '09. It was just an example I was trying to illustrate.

I can understand your logic in the OEMs replacing the 8600GTs with the 9400GTs but not totally sold that it is going to happen. A leap in graphical technology is going to happen for midrange computers at one point or another and I think there is a good chance it may happen this go around or in Fall 2008.

You know when Nvidia has their meetings with the OEMs in March/April that they are going to try to UPSELL and talk them in to replacing the 8600GTs in their line up with their successors the 9600GTs. That is the Marketing Machine of Nvidia. They did not get named Forbes 2007 Company of the Year for nothin.

Yeah, based on the naming convention my 5 year old Radeon 9600XT should rock the up coming GeForce 9600GT.

What are the typical watts on those Dell PSU's? 300-350? This card will need at least a 400 watt PSU. I guess the general public can have solid midrange gaming, but these increasing power requirements are shooting up the price of this midrange and negating the improved price/performance profile of this new midrange card.

too bad only maybe 4 or 5 out of those 20 would actually have a dedicated graphics card. the rest are integrated.

I still see PCI (Yeah, PCI) FX5500's at Wal-Mart for $100 with some random sign touting the insane performance.

@mumblings about the naming conventions...

hmm, now why would an inexperience user buy a high end video card after all (8800s mix)? anyone with a good mental condition who wants to buy a new graphics card would actually do an online search, check some benchies, and do some forum lookups to avoid confusion.

now if someone picks up the more expensive 320mb gts over the 8800gt, its his fault, not nvidias nor the etailer/retailer. its all about responsibility and protecting yourself from being mislead.

The fact that it is a 384MB card suggests it will be 192 bit, and thus, possibly somewhat related to said 8800gs.

Is that true? Why not?

http://en.expreview.com/?p=184

Good to see such a professional test rig, using a cardboard box under the motherboard. ("Hey, don't touch THAT!" and "You coffee spilt WHERE?" not to mention "Ok, who the hell bumped the desk this time!?" ).

Weren't they planning to release an 8800GS that was supposed to compete with the 3850? If so, what's the point of this card?
Besides, we have enough great mid-range cards as it is in all price segments.

Exactly.

i wanna see the 9800GT, or the GTX, wonder how smooth crysis will be.

Disappointingly it may not be much. I just saw a review the other day where Nvidia was showcasing their Tri-SLI motherboard. They had Three 8800GTXs all running in TRI-SLI.

The results?

On max settings in Crysis the game was reported to be running at about 40 Fraps with some dips in the game to as low as 17 fraps.

Which I think is kind of exciting. I like it when developers design games so graphic intensive that they are pretty much future proof for 5 years.

Look at Age of Empires 3 for example. That game out like 3 years ago and even today it takes a strong card to run it at max graphics.

On another note...

I did see some promising news that the R700 appears like it may be 50% faster or better than the R600. Take that and run 2,3, or even 4 of them in Quad X-Fire then you might have something.

http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php? [...] 5&Itemid=1

I like your post though. Everyone dreams of the day that smooth frame rates will be available in DX10 for mid range cards.

Ati uses the same system that Nvidia does. They just added the 'x' to represent 10,000 after the 9000 series:

9000 series
X000 series
X1000 series
2000 series (dropped the X)
3000 series

The 'hundreds' place is the same as Nvidia: 400 or below is low-end, 500-700 is midrange, 800-900 is top-end

Ati's suffixes are GT/GTO/PRO/XT/XTX.
This has recent6ly changed in the 3000 series, as they have replaced this with numbers... a card ending in '50' is what we'd used to call the 'pro', a card ending in '70' is what we'd used to call an 'xt'.

I did know all of that either.

RV770 does sound promising, infact after doing all this research im doing a build for a friend and using 2 3870x2 boards. I think he will be okay for a couple of years with that setup.

me on the other hand am more budget oriented hence the 8800 gt