NVIDIA GeForce 8600 & 8500 Preview

Today NVIDIA announced their new mainstream GeForce 8 Series based on the new 80nm G84 and G86 GPUs. The new line-up of GPUs actually conists of five different offerings. The 8600 GTS is the most powerful mainstream GPU, followed by the 8600 GT. There is also an 8500 GT, which will not feature a seperate SLI connector, but will be capable of the dual graphic card standard from NVIDIA using PCI-E transfers. The company will also be offering a GeForce 8300 GS and 8400 GS to OEMs only to integrate into systems.

Since NVIDIA is currently the only manufacturer with a shipping Shader Model 4.0 product on the market, competitive performance is yet unknown. The success of these cards depends largely on the price/performance in future DirectX 10 games, when compared to ATIs upcoming offerings [mid-May]. The year 2007 will mark the release of quite a few DirectX 10 based games, so it will be a very turbulent year in the graphic card industry.

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