Today Nvidia announced it new lineup of mid to low range DX10 video cards. The three main releases are the 8500GT along with the 8600GT and 8600GTS. Most major manufactures including ECS, Foxconn and Gigabyte are onboard and ready to ship.
The 8600 units come with DDR3 and are based on the 80nm G84 core. The 8500 unit on the other hand use DDR2 and is based on the 80nm G86 core. All three of the new offereing come standard with 256MB of memory. In terms of performance, initial web consensus would show the 8600GTS to perform around the same as the 7950GTX, the 8600GT around the 7950GT range and the 8500GT at around the 7600GT range. The big difference of course being that the new 8xxx level cards are DX10 compliant. There are of course also overclocked versions of each offered by selected manufacturers just to make things more interesting for you. Foxconn has also released a 512MB version of the 8500GT, which may or may not have an effect or performance. (I’ve already ranted on video card naming schemes so I’ll resist repeating myself)
If anything this release further solidifies Nvidia’s dominance in the market right now. With Vista starting to gain widespread adoption and the recent release of new DX10 video games, the consumer market for DX10 video card upgrades will soon be at it’s peak. With no DX10 based video card release date in sight (though we’ve been told it’s any day now) for the new R600 core (it looks very promising on paper) and rumors of its enormous power requirements ATI is starting to fall dangerously behind.
Good news.
[...] waiting for AMD/ATI to come up with their DX10 solution, nvidia came out and announced that their mainstream DX10 cards are available in stores. Yup, for as low as $100, you can have a DirectX 10 video card. now. nvidia have cornered the [...]