GeForce 9800 GTX

The rather weak competition from ATI, the graphics division of Advanced Micro Devices, which has continued since the purchase of the latter by ATI Technologies in October 2006, as well as the very successful G80 graphics chip, has seriously changed both the balance of the discrete graphics market and Nvidia's policy.

So, due to the lack of alternatives in the $599 segment, the company does not reduce the price of the GeForce 8800 GTX, but introduces the GeForce 8800 Ultra for $849. At the same time, instead of adjusting prices for GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB (G80) class cards, the GPU designer waits months to introduce the all-new G92 chip and fill the $199 to $649 price segments with it. The latter, as can be seen today, succeeded. However, this contributed to an unprecedentedly serious mess with product names.

At one time, the appearance of the G80 core led to the creation of a slender line of graphics cards, which included the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB, GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB, GeForce 8800 GTX, and the GeForce 8800 Ultra, which appeared much later. Hardly any of the company's customers had difficulty finding the most productive or, conversely, the average speed model.

However, with the release of the G92, Nvidia for some reason did not want to give products based on the new chip a new common model number, for example, GeForce 8900 or GeForce 9800, which would be the most logical step. As a result, there was a lot of confusion in the GeForce 8800 family, with the G92-based models being faster than the G80-based ones, but it wasn't clear from the name. Thus, the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB was ahead of the GeForce 8800 GTS 320/640MB, while the GeForce 8800 GT 256MB was inferior to them, and the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB, which appeared later, became a direct competitor not to the old models with the GTS index, but to the more powerful GeForce 8800 GTX.

 In the end, realizing that eight different products sold under the same model number was too much, Nvidia released the next generation - GeForce 9. The first representative of the GeForce 9 family was the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB based on the G94 graphics processor. The new product turned out to be very successful: already in the first reviews it was noted that it is ahead of the GeForce 8800 GT 256MB (not to mention the not very successful cards of the GeForce 8600 series) and sometimes is not inferior to the more expensive GeForce 8800 GT 512MB. This further complicated the situation for buyers, since all three cards are still present on the market in the price segment from 150 to 200 dollars (in Moscow retail - from 4 to 6 thousand rubles).

The second member and flagship of the GeForce 9 family is the GeForce 9800 GX2 1GB graphics card based on two G92 chips. By tradition, the new flagship of the family should confidently outperform the previous one in performance, which was done in most cases thanks to the high-quality optimization of Nvidia ForceWare drivers for working with two chips in AFR mode.

The last announced representative of the new line was the already mentioned GeForce 9800 GTX 512MB based on the G92 graphics processor. In addition to slightly increased clock frequencies compared to the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB, the new product received support for 3-way SLI, SLI HybridPower technologies, as well as a 27-cm 12-layer printed circuit board with a pair of PCI Express power connectors.

Although the number "9" in the series number hints at some new and not yet offered features, in fact, the GeForce 9800 GTX, 9800 GX2 graphics cards do not differ at the hardware level from the GeForce 8800 GT 256MB, 8800 GT 512MB, 8800 GTS 512MB, since they are all based on the G92 chip. The latter has exactly one significant difference from the G80 (on which the first generation GeForce 8800 was based): a more advanced video processor that can hardware decode HD video streams encoded with H.264 and VC-1, as well as perform HD post-processing video.

The new product differed from the previous most productive graphics card based on the G92 in two ways: higher GPU and memory frequencies, as well as the presence of two SLI connectors, which really makes it the successor of the GeForce 8800 GTX, which, as you know, supported triple SLI 3-processor configurations. Thus, it is obvious that the GeForce 9800 GTX is indeed positioned as the heir to the GeForce 8800 GTX.

Specifications NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX

In general, we have before our eyes an example of how a good idea in itself can be pretty spoiled by both marketing confusion and unsuccessful engineering decisions. However, before the introduction of the new GT200 core, the Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX rightfully held the title of the fastest single-chip graphics card.

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