14 DAY TRIAL // History tells us that the vast majority of gamers don't like high-end and expensive gaming gear. If we analyze the popularity of some games, we could sketch a profile of the gamers' hardware, although this is not 100 percent accurate.
The best-sellers in the gaming history seem to be titles like World of Warcraft, Counterstrike, and even the old StarCraft - games that need minimal amounts of processing power to run smoothly. On the other side of the fence are powerhog titles like Crysis, that was a total lackluster, despite the fact that it has already hit the torrents. This is some sort of alarm signal triggered by the market, and Nvidia was one of the first hardware manufacturers to comply.
"After going to all the GeForce LANs and seeing the rigs that gamers play on, we wanted to kick off the GeForce 9 with the perfect GPU for gamers." said Ujesh Desai, general manager of GeForce desktop GPUs at NVIDIA. "The first product to be introduced in the GeForce 9 family gives gamers the horsepower to play cutting-edge DirectX 10 games at a price they will love and can afford."
The new geForce 9600 GT is the first unit to wear Nvidia's GeForce 9 series of graphics cores (G94). Today's release is at least strange, given the fact that Nvidia has made a habit out of introducing the greatest graphics card in the series, rather than a mid-range offering. The first graphic card with the G94 graphics core is now available at a sub-$200 price point, but this does not mean that Nvidia is bailing out of the high-end GPU market, but it is shifting its focus towards the largest chunk of its market.
"NVIDIA continues to innovate in hardware technology so that game enthusiasts and consumers can fully experience the incredible graphics offerings in Microsoft's operating systems, including Windows Vista," said Kevin Unangst, senior global director of Games for Windows, Microsoft. "The new 9600 GT GPU further extends NVIDIA's ability to deliver improved DirectX 10 performance on Windows Vista at an affordable price point, so that anyone and everyone can have an amazing gaming experience."
GeForce 9600 GT-based graphics cards are available now in different flavors from leading add-in card manufacturers. They will hit the retailers' shelves at different prices, depending on the additional features and implementations.