The Good Strong performance on 3D resolutions up to 1,920x1,280; accessible $300 price tag; HDCP compliance and flawless HD video output; next-gen graphics support. The Bad Windows Vista software drivers are not fully cooked; the combination of a double-wide card and a lower price might be a rude surprise for some buyers; AMD's forthcoming next-gen ATI cards remain an unknown quantity.

The Bottom Line No other 3D graphics card comes close to this bang for the buck, making the 320MB XFX GeForce 8800 GTS mostly an easy decision if you need a midrange upgrade. Nvidia still has to polish off its Vista software, and the sooner-or-later arrival of competing cards muddies the waters a bit, but if you need a midprice graphics card today, this should be your pick. Visit for details. We know that AMD's next-gen ATI Radeon graphics cards are on the way this year, but until they make their debut, Nvidia's GeForce 8000-series cards continue to offer far-and-away the best 3D graphics performance. XFX's new 320MB GeForce 8800 GTS card is no exception, and its $300 price tag means you'll have to suffer less of a financial blow to get ready for the dawn of next-gen PC graphics. Nvidia is still plagued by the absence of a full Windows Vista driver, but even if the software was ready today, with no true next-gen games to play with, we can't say much about these cards' next-gen performance.

What is clear is that for current 3D games, if the 320MB GeForce 8800 GTS isn't quite as fast as its higher-end GeForce counterparts, it's still miles beyond anything currently available in its price range. It's also a better deal than anything from ATI-at least, for now. The XFX GeForce 8800 GTS is actually one of three new 3D graphics cards unleashed today by Nvidia. In addition to that model, you'll also find the $350 GeForce 8800 GTS XXX and the $330 GeForce 8800 GTS Extreme on the market from Nvidia's various board partners.

Nvidia also offers three flavors of its, which debuted back in November 2006. The 640MB models start at roughly $400 and scale up similarly to the 320MB cards. The difference between the 320MB cards, though, lies mostly in clock speeds. The default 8800 GTS has a 500MHz core clock and a 1.6GHz memory clock. The XXX goes up to a 580MHz core and 1.8GHz on the memory, and the middle Extreme model goes down to a 560MHz core and 1.7GHz on the RAM. The 640MB cards have similar clock speeds, but the high-end and middle models have slightly slower cores. Our colleague Sarju Shah over at GameSpot put a wide selection of the cards through a battery of 3D benchmarks, and he found that the GeForce 8000-series continues to dominate the older Radeon X1900's, if not on raw performance, then in value.

If you find all of the different flavors of the 8800 GTS confusing, we don't blame you. The easy way to think about this is if your monitor can't display higher than 1,920x1,280, you should be fine with the 320MB cards. If you want to go higher than that, you'll need a 640MB or larger model, especially if you want to turn on antialiasing and other image-quality tweaks. Of course, that's with current titles. It remains to be seen how that performance will scale when true next-gen games, such as come out.

Gts

As for ATI cards, the outperforms the XFX GeForce 8800 GTS at the higher-resolution settings, as expected and also by a few frames here and there on the lower-resolution tests. It also costs about $100 more than the GeForce card, and unlike the GeForce 8000's, all current Radeon cards lack support for DirectX 10, the Windows Vista-only special sauce that will bring 3D graphics to the next level. For its part, we think AMD can't afford to take too much longer in bringing its own DirectX 10 cards to market. We know that its next cards are code-named R600, and we've heard multiple release-date rumors. It's hard to advocate waiting for these cards when we can't say when they'll come out and when we don't know anything about them. Still, if you're not concerned about making the leap to a new 3D card right now, especially with no next-gen games on the immediate horizon, it might not be a bad idea to be patient. CNET chooses not to dabble in the accuracy-challenged pursuit of 3D graphics chip rumors, but you can find plenty of Web sites out there that do.

If you'd like to stay on top of what may (or may not) be down the road in 3D hardware, we'd suggest checking in on a site such as the for whatever's currently churning in the rumor mill. If you're wondering what makes the GeForce 8800 GTS so fast in general, we'll refer you to our review of the for the full breakdown of Nvidia's new architecture, which applies to all of its 8000-series cards. We'll point out here, though, some recent developments in video we've discovered. The GeForce 8000-series cards all come with built-in support for HDCP decoding.

This means if your PC has an HD optical drive with built-in copy protection, your graphics card will qualify as a certified component, and you won't risk a downgrade of your movie content if the industry ever decides to put that capability to work. The back plane of the card has two DVI outputs, as well as a proprietary out for a component video adapter.

We found in testing that pumping a Blu-ray movie through a GeForce 8800 GTS over HDMI works perfectly, but component video doesn't work in Windows Vista. Nvidia is aware of the problem, and is working on a driver update to solve this and to bring the GeForce 8800 cards their first fully certified Windows Vista driver in general. To its credit, Nvidia has also set up a for help with its Vista software development.

For the video issue, though, as long as you use a DVI-to-HDMI adapter to connect the card to your television, you shouldn't have any trouble. Finally, we can't help but point out that the XFX GeForce 8800 GTS is one of, if not the first double-width card to drop below the $300 mark. We have a feeling the price tag on this model will entice many of you who aren't interested in crossing over into the $400 or $500 range. Be prepared, then, to make way for this space-hungry piece of hardware. Even midrange 3D cards have long required a direct connection to your PC's power supply unit, so we don't expect you'll be surprised by that requirement (Nvidia recommends a 400-watt PSU for this card). Also, be sure to check out the inside of your case to see what kind of room you have next to your PCI Express graphics slot before you buy this card; you might find that you need to rearrange an expansion card or two to make the space.

The GeForce 8800 GTS 320 was a performance graphics card by NVIDIA, launched in February 2007. Built on the 90 nm process, and based on the G80 graphics processor, in its G80-100-K0-A2 variant, the card supports DirectX 10.0.

The G80 graphics processor is a large chip with a die area of 484 mm² and 681 million transistors. Unlike the fully unlocked GeForce 8800 GTX, which uses the same GPU but has all 128 shaders enabled, NVIDIA has disabled some shading units on the GeForce 8800 GTS 320 to reach the product's target shader count. It features 96 shading units, 48 texture mapping units and 20 ROPs. NVIDIA has placed 320 MB GDDR3 memory on the card, which are connected using a 320-bit memory interface. The GPU is operating at a frequency of 513 MHz, memory is running at 792 MHz. Being a dual-slot card, the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 320 draws power from 1x 6-pin power connectors, with power draw rated at 143 W maximum. Display outputs include: 2x DVI, 1x S-Video.

Evga Geforce 8800 Gts Driver

GeForce 8800 GTS 320 is connected to the rest of the system using a PCI-Express 1.0 x16 interface. The card measures 267 mm in length, and features a dual-slot cooling solution. Its price at launch was 269 US Dollars. DirectX 10.0 OpenGL 3.3 OpenCL 1.1 Vulkan N/A CUDA 1.0 Shader Model 4.0 G80 GPU Notes PureVideo HD: VP1 VDPAU: Not Supported Each Streaming Multiprocessor(SM) in the chip architecture contains 8 SPs and 2 SFUs. Each SP can fulfill up to two single precision operations MAD per clock. Each SFU can fulfill up to four operations SF per clock (these units can also handle single-precision floating-point multiplications per clock).

Evga 8800 Gts Drivers

The approximate ratio of operations MAD to operations SF is equal 2:1. The theoretical SP + SFU performance in single-precision floating point operations FLOPSsp + sfu, GFLOPS of the graphics card with shader count n and shader frequency f, GHz, is estimated by the following formula: FLOPSsp+sfu; f × n × 3.

Alternative formula: FLOPSsp+sfu; f × m × ( 8 SPs. 2 (MAD) + 4. 2 SFUs ). Maya.iff files photoshop for mac free.

Nvidia 8800 Gts Drivers

m - SM count. SP - Shader Processor (Unified Shader, CUDA Core) SFU - Special Function Unit SM - Streaming Multiprocessor MAD - ADD+MUL Retail boards based on this design (1) Name GPU Clock Memory Clock Other Changes 570 MHz 900 MHz 9 inches/229 mm.