Related Articles

If you pulled a random person out of a crowd at your local computer hardware store and asked him or her to name the first fast video card that popped into their head, there is a good chance that their responsive would have the letters 'G', 'T', and 'X' in it. The last big GTX, the 8800 GTX, was a radical product that introduced a new unified shader architecture that ushered in a new era of video card performance. When the 8800 GTX came out in November of 2006, it left virtually every other card it faced well behind, trailing in the dust. And since then, not much else has come out that has been far faster. But every reign has to end sometime -- and now, after more than two years, the 9800GTX has touched down at Neoseeker's hardware lab. So, probably many are wondering: will this new GTX bring the same sort of leap forward? XFX is going to help us answer this question.

As you are probably aware, NVIDIA's ninth generation of video cards has only recently appeared. The first ninth-gen'er was the 9600 GT, which had only 64 stream processors, but was able to keep up the pace with the ATI's HD 3870 and NVIDIA's 8800 GT. The second ninth gen card on the scene came two weeks ago, with the 9800 GX2. The 9800 GX2 impressed us here at the lab -- while it was not for everyone with a price tag of over $600, it was a true monster of card, that ripped through games like a Ferrari on fire. Today's 9800 GTX is the third card coming out of generation nine, and it will be retailing for between $300 and $350, placing it one step up from the 8800 GTS 512, and one larger step down the 9800 GX2.

As mentioned in the 9600 GT review, NVIDIA's nine series isn't as innovative as perhaps the eighth series was. The NVIDIA R&D budget seems to have been spent (for now), and this time around its more about optimization and tweaks to the G92 core that first appeared with popular 8800 GT. In many ways, the 9800 GTX does seem much like a faster 8800 GTS 512MB. It has higher clock speeds and 16 more shader processors than the 8800 GTS 512MB, but as you will see in this review, both cards seems closely related.

Does this new GTX have what it takes to get people excited? Let's find out.