nVidia Announces Early Christmas for Gamers, Power Users

Go ahead, click on the link to nVidia's home page. You'll see the most stunning graphics ever seen from a consumer PC.

The new 8800 GTX GPU is a whopping 400+ mm, giving gamers 631 million transistors worth of DirectX 10 gaming power. The reviews are all gaga, and well they should. Now, you can play with full AA and still have frame rates to spare.

Also announced are the nForce 680i, as in 'i" for Intel, motherboards. Like the previous generation 590 mobos, nVidia has full support for SLI, elaborate as well as push-button overclocking, and a no-cost turbocharge of 20% when an nVidia graphics card (7900 and up) is married to the nForce mobo.

All of this can be yours at about $2,000 and up (way up).

I expect a (long) line for the 8800. Maybe not as long as the PlayStation 3, but long. Why? Because the 8800 has 128 stream processors that can handle vertices or pixel shading. That's how DirectX 10, out soon with Windows Vista, simplifies GPUs and ensures that massive parallelism will be the norm from here on out. One big reason to queue up for an 8800 is the fact that it's very backwards compatible with DirectX 9 games -- at higher performanc levels.

In short, a tour de (n)Force by nVidia. Buy here.

Pete