NVIDIA has showed its trump card, delivering the highest performance graphics card and the first DX10 graphics card ahead of its rival.

In terms of performance, the GeForce 8800GTX is just amazing. With speeds so much faster than existing graphics card in DX9 applications, we foresee that with SLI, the performance will be manificent.

Other than the realistic demos we saw, the image quality of this card has improved from previous generations. In our HQV test, it scored a high of 118. This is not usually the case for previous generation of cards as previous cards were unable to do well in tests like Film Cadence and Noise Reduction.

Playing back of H.264 movies or transport streams is smoother than before as the GPU offloads the CPU in delivering the HD contents through PureVideo using PowerDVD. In fact CPU utilisation was about close to 100% when hardware acceleration is not enabled. With acceleration enabled, CPU utilisation drops to close to 40-50% depending on TS.

When we received the card, we prepared a high powered PSU. At the end of the day, we used the 3 yrs old old ANTEC true power 480W  PSU to power it up. It works fine for a single card. Noise level is acceptable but the length of the card seems to be longer than any current video cards. In fact, the length exceeds the width of my Gigabyte GA-945P-DQ6. It also takes up the space of 2 slots.

Overall, I am very impressed with the quality both in 3D and 2D.  At this moment, the GeForce 8800GTX should remain as the speediest card we have ever tested.

Price ~ 599 USD.

Pros

• Amazing image quality in 2D and 3D
• Purevideo HD
• DX10 support
• SM4.0
   

Cons

• The dimension of the card might be a bit too long.

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.