I'm not going to beat about the bush here, ATI (i'm going to use AMD from this moment forth) have sadly cocked up again and left the market wide open for NVIDIA, it's sad, but it's true. R600 has had so many issues surrounding its launch (still does) that many who were holding on for one are beggining to give up and instead go for a GeForce 8 series card. Currently AMD have little realistic options to offer users in the high to upper mid range sector, and it's getting worse by the day (8600 series imminent!).

With the market all to themselves on most fronts, NVIDIA must be raking in the beer money. But though the high end 8800 GTX and GTS cards must be selling in the tens of thousands, and therefore causing many hangovers at the green camp, it's the upper-mid and downwards sectors that generally bring in the big bucks, enough to get a few bags of peanuts on top of the drinks, and the recently launched GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB nicely fits into this category, what with it's price tag hovering around the £200 mark.

The only difference between the more costly 8800 GTS 640MB and GTS 320MB is its memory size, everything else is identical, so theoretically, differences between the two should only become significant when memory is the big concern (high resolution + high AA levels), otherwise performance should be similar, which means if not over pushed the 8800 GTS 320MB should be a winner.

Video Card Comparisons Card: 8800 GTS 8800 GTX ATI X1900 XTX Chip: G80 G80 R580 DX support DX10 + SM4.0 G80DX10 + SM4.0 DX9 + SM3.0 Process: 90nm 90nm 90nm Core Clock: 500 MHz 575 MHz 650 MHz Memory Clock: 800 MHz 900 MHz 775 MHz Memory interface: 320 bit 384 bit 256 bit Memory Bandwidth: 64 GB/s 86.4 GB/s 49.6 GB/s Memory Size: 320 / 640 MB 768 MB 512 MB Vertex: 96 FP32 scalar ALU's 128 FP32 scalar ALU's 8 Fragment: 48 Texture: 16 ROPS 20 24 16

I've included the 8800 GTX in this chart for kicks only, the real competition to the GTS 320MB is the... well, to be perfectly honest there isn't really any direct competition for the money, I suppose the X1950 XTX is the closest, but it does cost quite a bit more. The X1900 specs are above as i'm going to be using this card during testing, it's a little slower than the X1950 XTX but it does give a very good indication of the competition available at a similar price point to the GTS 320MB.

By now you've probably read more than you'll care to remember about how different the architecture is for G80 compared to the previous generations, so I'll just cover enough so that above table makes sense - plus a little extra.

In older cards the various shader processes (vertex, pixel, texture) were handled by different pipelines, you can clearly see this for the X1900 XTX. With G80, NVIDIA have introduced what they call "stream" processors, which are universal shader's capable of processing all the different shader types from the same ALU's. The reason behind this appears to be because of the DX10 API. A unified architecture isn't actually the inevitable step of progress, but more a side step, where DX10 and the way it works makes this configuration much more efficient compared to that of DX9.0.

The one clear benefit of a unified architecture is that game developers no longer have to worry about shader complexity, the flexibility of potentially having 128/96 fragment processors available if you so desired is something you could never have done with a DX9 architecture.

NVIDIA have taken a lot of slack for poor image quality in the past, so it's no surprise to see an overhaul in this area. There are newly introduced anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering methods to drool over, and i'll cover these in due course on the "Test Setup & Benchmarking" page.

In this review, we'll be having a look at the factory overclocked Gainward 8800 GTS 320MB Golden Sample, and will be concerned mostly with how much performance you can get for just over £200.