Final Thoughts and Conclusions
The GeForce 8800GTX is nothing special. That is, if you consider video cards that enter the market and totally wipe the floor with anything else available to be normal. The 8800GTX does that. It is abundantly clear that NVIDIA has something amazing on their hands with the G80 core. As mentioned in the introduction to this article, it is quite rare that a product entering the scene can perform twice as good as its predecessor. Not even dual-core CPUs, you know those CPUs with 2 cores, as opposed to those older CPUs with 1 core, offered twice the performance of their predecessors when they hit the scene. With multithreaded applications becoming more readily available, that point can be argued, but we digress. When Intel dropped the Core 2 family on the hardware world back in July, it DID double the performance of its Pentium-D predecessors in a few areas. With the performance capability of NVIDIA’s 7 series on the G70 core and its derivatives, it would seem unthinkable that they could double it with their next core, the G80. Well umm, they kind of did. It’s not exactly twice as good, but it certainly is pretty close.

Moving away from the subject at hand for a moment, we would like to discuss something that happened this year that we took to heart. Consoles, not computers, consoles, were acclaimed around the world as being capable of producing the most impressive game graphics ever seen. PC Enthusiasts cried foul at the notion that a console, based almost entirely around PC technology using parts from PC manufacturers, could possibly be superior to its more diverse cousin. Well we didn’t like the sound of it either. But we played some XBOX360 games at Best Buy and we played some PS3 games at E3, and it slowly started to sink in: these systems are quite capable of producing some killer graphics. But it wasn’t TOO big of a problem for us. We knew that if ATI and NVIDIA were able to produce graphics chips for the XBOX360 and PS3, respectively, that they surely would have something even more advanced up their sleeves for use in the PC. Well it turns out that they did, and NVIDIA’s came first. Today we are proud to announce that with the G80, the graphics technology crown has been stripped from those wretched consoles and placed squarely back on the head of the personal computer, where it belongs, of course.

But what about price. You get all of this graphics muscle, and indeed, all of this dead weight of a very heavy video card, but for what price? The GeForce 8800GTX, NVIDIA’s new flagship part, is expected to debut with an MSRP of $549.99. This sure does seem expensive for just a video card. But we have shown here today that it is well near twice that of a GeForce 7900GT. The price of a 7900GT is right around $250 at the time of publishing, so twice that would be what….. we’re not very good at math, but we think it’s about $500. Add in a substantial premium for a card that utilizes brand new technology, is DirectX 10 Compatible, Supports SM4.0, is really huge… and all of a sudden $549 seems like a bargain. Should this price be too much for you to bare, and don’t get us wrong, it more than likely is, NVIDIA’s GeForce 8800GTS, the next step down on the G80 ladder, will be available for $499. We are unsure of the performance of the 8800GTS, but we obviously expect it to be quite good too. Is it a lot of money to ask for just a single video card? Absolutely. Is it a reasonable price to ask for what is quite simply the single most powerful video card ever (for now)? Probably.