Product Listing

GeForce 8800 GTS: The 320MB Proposition

By Vincent Chang - 14 Feb 2007

Conclusion

Conclusion

The hardware has been available for months now; since last November in fact. And now finally after numerous delays and revisions, the second piece of the puzzle, Microsoft's Windows Vista is available to the general public. The missing part of the DirectX 10 equation is the games, which are unfortunately still unavailable.

Headline titles that wowed the gamers at E3 and other gaming tradeshows like Crysis, Unreal Tournament 3 and Age of Conan have been delayed while those that did not, like Hellgate: London, have release dates that are months away. Even Microsoft's own Flight Simulator X shipped with only DirectX 9.0 support. A future patch is expected to enable DirectX 10 but only the most optimistic of gamers would put a time frame on when they could start seeing some DirectX 10 visual voodoo. In short, DirectX 10 is still very much in its infancy and some analysts have even predicted that 2008 would be the earliest before we start seeing mainstream DirectX 10 powered games. We're still far from even getting past the first quarter of the year, so it's still anybody's guess if we'll see some pleasant surprises when we get into the second half of the year.

Of course, that's not to say that there is no reason at all to get a GeForce 8 card now, since these cards provide significant performance gains over the previous generation for current games in addition to DirectX 10 support. While NVIDIA may not have sold as many GeForce 8 cards as the company would have liked (even though they did move a decent volume), it does have the first mover advantage over ATI. And the new 320MB version of the GeForce 8800 GTS aims to consolidate this position before the anticipated arrival of ATI's R600 chip. NVIDIA is offering practically the same card with half the memory, so one gets the future benefits of DirectX 10 at a more palatable price point while enjoying reasonable performance boosts. Of course you might be wondering why NVIDIA hadn't introduced this simple and straightforward SKU earlier. Multiple reasons exist and the foremost reasons are to capitalize sales of its higher performing parts in the early months, amass quantity for a wider target audience at lower price points and of course clear more inventory of its high-end GeForce 7 series in the meantime. While us consumers stand to benefit from further price slashing with the incoming of the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB model at a lower price bracket, NVIDIA would have also realized other goals in the process such as denting ATI's sales of its successful Radeon X1950 series, suppress the rumors of the upcoming R600 GPUs on the Internet and of course enjoy the benefit of riding with Vista's launch to further seed its true DirectX 10 parts.

The new GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB proves itself as an interesting DirectX10 graphics card entry, but prospective owners should perform some analysis on their expected resolution of use to better determine if this card would fit their bill.

With all due respect, the new GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB graphics card performed quite reasonably in many tests, but not all of them though. It can easily tackle games of the early 2006 era and prior at a very high resolutions and image quality settings, but we can't say for certain how it would fare in this year's upcoming games as developers are taking advantage of the new DirectX 10 API for which we can't predict nor forecast the performance aspects yet, let alone relate that with the impact of frame buffer size. Among our tests, F.E.A.R. and Company of Heroes represent some of the more taxing games that saw themselves being limited in performance quite significantly with a reduced memory frame buffer. Clearly, it looks like 512MB frame buffers are going to be a minimum necessity by next year if you cherish the best of image quality.

For those of you who've been craving for the speed of a GeForce 8800 series but without its hefty entry tag, this new 320MB edition at a price point of US$299 should tempt some of those who have been sitting on the fence. We stress "some" because this clearly depends on the image quality settings and resolutions used. However with the mighty processing prowess of the GeForce 8800 series, more often than not, users would want to max out all image quality settings. This leaves the resolution used as one of the crucial factors. Judging by our results, the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB would fare well for those who stick to resolutions of 1280x1024 such as the many 19-inch monitor users. It can even handle resolutions of up to 1600x1200 quite satisfactorily and should please even 22-inch LCD monitor users gaming at their monitor's native resolution. However for gaming at resolution beyond 1600x1200, we would recommend topping up for the 640MB edition to prevent obsolescence. In fact the GeForce 8800 GTX would prove a better proposition for the ultra large panel owners than even the original GeForce 8800 GTS.

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