NVidia Starts to Compete with Itself

The Nvidia 8 series of next-generation video cards have easily made it to the front pages of any specialized forum and electronic magazine. Despite their salty price, the 8 series all feature state-of-the-art cards that can satisfy the most enthusiast gamer. Or, maybe not.

Nvidia first issued the high-end division of the 8-Series cards, the GTX and Ultra versions, followed by the lower end cards, the 8600s, the 8500s, and the bottom 8400s, dedicated to those who would like a fancy video-card but wouldn't really blow their family budget away. However, between the high-end versions and the newest additions in the 8800 series, dedicated to the common user, there is a huge precipice in terms of performance.

The 8800 GPU based cards were either power-horses, or snails and there was no middle sector. It's either expensive and performing, or cheap, but useless for more recent games, even at a huge performance compromise. Nvidia fixed the glitch and announced a middle-level video card to bear the 8800GT name.

This recent addition was cheaper than the 8800GTS bigger brother, but at the same time it would deliver much higher performance than the low-end cards in the series. In fact, it would be even better than the 8800GTS itself, since the GT version is wrapped around the smaller G92 GPU architecture, rather than the older G80. Except for the Ultra version that is still the user's favorite in the series the GT has become the best.

This may seem pretty unfair for the 8800GTS users that have paid a lot of extra cash to get an ace and found out that the company was giving away much better cards at lower prices. Nvidia saw the msitake and announced an upgraded version of the 8800GTS, to directly compete with the GT model. This upgrade would be called the 8800GTS SSC2 and would feature 128 stream processors and not 96, as the previous model.

This week is the big unveiling of the updated 8800GTS, to feature a brand-new G92 GPU architecture and 512 MB of RAM that would make the difference from the 320MB 8800GTS.