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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.

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 640MB GeForce 8800 GTS, 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 Crysis come out. As for ATI cards, the 512MB Radeon X1950 XTX 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.
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.

Mark06
(Longer bars indicate better performance

Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX (768MB)

10665 Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS XXX (320MB)

9727 XFX GeForce 8800 GTS (320MB)

8729 Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS (640MB)

8708 ATI Radeon X1950 XTX (512MB)

6717