Introduction
It's a green-letter day today. NVIDIA's launching its next-generation GPUs and complementing them with a brand-new core logic.
Thinking about a little history, NVIDIA's G71 GPU served it well, with the GeForce 7900 GTX SKU, an update of the decent GeForce 7800, launched seven months ago to counter the performance threat posed by ATI's X1900 series. NVIDIA then popped out the GeForce 7950 GX2, claiming it to be the fastest 'single-card' graphics card on the market. Perhaps it was, in certain circumstances, but a number of obvious and serious foibles inhibited it from the outset.
ATI then stepped up the high-end assault by launching its Radeon X1950 XTX SKU just over two months ago. It addressed the problems associated with the noisy cooler on the X1900 series and increased performance by adding in some faster GDDR4 memory and a slight tweak to the R580 core. NVIDIA, really, was behind.
The two major graphics card companies' roadmaps rarely converge when releasing brand-new GPUs. Today sees NVIDIA roll out its G80-based graphics card, known to the world as GeForce 8800 GTX, and, as you will come to appreciate, open up a big can of green whupass on everything that has gone before it.
ASUS was the first manufacturer to offer HEXUS the opportunity to evaluate a retail card based on G80. Read on to see if the ASUS EN8800GTX is destined to be in your Christmas stocking. Ho, ho, ho.
