Ok, I tried to make the title as eye-catcher as possible to get a few people to spend a few seconds to read this.
 
Since yesterday's release of the 9800GTX, many threads opened about whether or not go for a 9800GTX (either for a new system or EVGA's Step-Up program) over a 8800GTS; I myself wondered if I should pay the 45$ it would cost me to step-up my 512-P3-N841-A3 (8800GTS factory clocked @ 670MHz).
 
Looking to various reviews, I noticed that most tests were made using the cards "official" drivers, that is 169.25 for GF8 and 174.74 for GF9. Yeah, you see where I'm going with that ... Being a numbers freak, I did a little comparison, on my own system of how the 174.74 drivers would impact my performance (got the here).
 
I did my tests with Crysis (Crysis benchmark Tool) on Windows Vista Ultimate x64, 5 passes for each test. These tests were made on a recent installation of Vista (2 weeks old, not much installed yet), but not in a strictly controlled environment (still had AVG, Pidgin, ... running in background). Here is a summary of the results:
 

 
I encourage anyone to try it out (even on a few resolutions) and post their findings.
 
For those who want to know my rig's spec, just look in my profile, it's all there.

---------------
The capacity to learn is a gift; The ability to learn is a skill; The willingness to learn is a choice.  - Rebec of Ginaz

WARNING DO NOT CLICK ON THE ABOVE IMAGES - THEY WILL TRY TO LOAD JAVA SCRIPT

---------------

As far as I know the 8800GTS 512 (G92) has exactly the same GPU as the 9800GTX, just with slower clocks.  It has been a long time (Dec 2007) since nVidia has released a new driver for the series 8 cards.  I am sure once they roll up the driver improvements found in the 174 driivers into the unified driver, all the G92 core GPU's (possibly G80 as well, depending on whether the improvements are general application improvements or architectural improvements) should see the same sort of improvements.

That takes away any reason to step up save the name.

I was just going to change to these, so I'll post improvements as well, when I do.

I ran those beta drivers with my 8800gts and saw a 3dmark improvement of about 200. I dont know if that adds anything to this topic because I cant say I understand it completely.

http://en.expreview.com/2008/03/25 [...] ng-test/5/

I can't seem to install the 64-bit Vista drivers. I get errors stating it can't detect the hardware the drivers support, and that I am trying to run a 32-bit installed on a 64-bit OS.
 
I downloaded the 64-bit version.

Anybody remembers the Geforce2 "Ti" series? The new cards were rebranded and boasted a 28-50% performance improvement over the regular model's performance upon release, but anybody with an older model could update their card's driver and get those same performance improvements for the price of a download (as a side note, even older chips - like my TNT, NV4 - got a definite boost from the driver update).
 
More recently, we had the Geforce6 and Geforce7 families; asking people who seem to know quite a lot about these (the Xorg Nouveau staff, currently writing a reverse engineered driver, with working 3D for these cards), Geforce6 (especially later chip revisions like 6600) and Geforce7 have a lot in common, and are in fact addressed by the official driver as being the same family -just different chip revisions.
 
Having tested both NV1x chip revisions (as the "ti" chip was, indeed, slightly tweaked), I'd say that the G9x could (if the parallel persists), indeed, contain some fixes over erratas and may indeed be much better performing in as of yet unseen corner cases, but that's it - if you already have a top-notch G8x chip, don't upgrade (except if it's a 8600, as the 9600 does indeed leave it in the dust). Remember, if you were the proud owner of a 6600GT, getting a 7600 card wasn't really worth the money...
 
For those wondering: the "ti" chip revision for Geforce2 (NV1x family) seems to perform much better on some VRAM-intensive operations (like GL_EXT_texture_from_pixmap) than the original, with the very same driver revision. Said extension was added to the NVIDIA driver 2 years ago, so...

I've been running 174.20's for about 6 weeks or so now.
After installing my 2nd GTX I was getting big lock-ups in CoD4 the moment I had turned SLi on, so as recommended by pauldh (thanks! ) I tried the drivers from Guru3D. Performance was much, much better and I didn't have all the damn locking up either! I should add I was running the 169.21's prior to that, at the the time the mose up-to-date, and I was getting lock-ups, thanks Nvidia!    
I'll try the 74's later I think

I always hosted my images on imageshack, any alternatives?

---------------
The capacity to learn is a gift; The ability to learn is a skill; The willingness to learn is a choice.  - Rebec of Ginaz

My point was that you could probably get 9800GTX performance from a 8800GTS (G92) simply by upgrading drivers. The 3DMark improvement might not seem like much because default 3DMark tests are rather "low-res", don't seem to use AA or AF and the driver seems to have better improvement more in the upper range.

---------------
The capacity to learn is a gift; The ability to learn is a skill; The willingness to learn is a choice.  - Rebec of Ginaz

Flicker.com

side note: The 174.74 drivers don't work right with Rivatuner/AtiTool with XP/Vista x64. The OCing tools are unable to stick the OCing changes. They revert back to stock.

---------------
E2180 @3.2Ghz + P35DS3L +8400GS (700/475 OC)  

Im still waiting for somebody to test the 9800GTX and 8800GTS with the same drivers at the same clocks. I wonder what the difference would be.

The card I have now if better lol. I will keep her for a long time. I will be getting one of these Q9450s however though.

http://en.expreview.com/2008/04/03 [...] review/12/
 
 
Wow!  
 
The 9800GTX will definately have more headroom and beat the GTS when overclocked but the GTX is a waste of time. My GTS overclocked to 820 core, I wonder how high the 9800 will go

 
"Remember, if you were the proud owner of a 6600GT, getting a 7600 card wasn't really worth the money..."
 
Mate I had both a 6600gt and a 7600gt and the difference was ENORMOUS.  If you meant 6800gt then yeah fair enough.  

 
If thats true that nvidia hasn't made a driver for G80 cards since december, then thats pretty shocking indeed.  The 174 drivers inflate the 9800gtx & gx2 scores a bit against the old gtx and newer 512mb gts.  The 9800gtx sooo isn't worth the premium when you could be a good brand factory oc'd gts and up the clocks a bit more.

 
 
Probably about the same... 820/2008/2204 is what my 8800GTS 512 will do.