The first thing that strikes you about Nvidia’s new ‘G80’ cards is the size. The new flagship, 8800 GTX is more than 28cm long (longer than many motherboards) and the lesser 8800 GTS pushes 25cm. Both have large heat-sink-fans but both are mercifully quiet. The 8800 GTX sports two power connectors and a second SLI slot. Nvidia isn’t saying what the latter is for but good guesses would include physics processing and additional SLI-like features.

They’re built around an 80nm fabrication process and support DirectX 10 and Shader Model 4. Indeed, the 8800 series represents a major advance in graphics card architecture. There will be no more talk of vertex and pixel pipelines. Instead we’ve new unified shader processors called Stream Processors (SPs). Rather than a queuing up of vertex and shader instructions (and potential bottlenecks) a new thread manager called GigaThread dynamically allocates pixel and vertex code (and new geometry, physics and GPGPU data) to the SPs as required, so it shouldn’t matter whether a scene is vertex, pixel or geometry heavy.

The geometry shader is new to DirectX 10 and these are the first cards to support it. Whereas vertex shaders allows you to move individual vertices, and pixel shaders work on a per pixel basis, geometry shaders allow the GPU to alter an entire triangle and its surrounding vertices. This allows more-complicated, faster-reacting, more-gradual deformation effects and (among other things) better shadow mapping. This all translates to better looking games with more jaw-dropping, realistic effects and stops the GPU harassing the CPU as much.

Other new features include ‘Quantum Effects’, which is Nvidia’s name for GPGPU physics, and ‘Lumenex’, - 128-bit HDR. HDR and antialiasing are finally available at once on an Nvidia card.

Nvidia’s 7900 GTX had 32 pixel and shader units (combined) while Ati’s X1900 XTX had 56. The 8800 GTX card has 128 SPs and the GTS has 96. The core clock speeds are 575MHz and 500MHz on the GTX and GTS respectively. The GTX sports 768MB of GDDR3 RAM which runs at 900MHz and a 384-bit memory interface while the GTS sports 640MB running at 800MHz and a 320-bit interface. The strange numbers, Nvidia claims, are because any increase in memory and bandwidth would cause additional expense and no performance increase. The SPs run at clock speeds of 1350MHz on the GTX and 1200MHz on the GTS.

Good news is that there won’t be a very long wait for Direct X 10 games to hit the market (compared to the DirectX 8 to DirectX 9 transition). Games already compatible include Crysis (Far Cry’s sequel), Flight Simulator X, Quake Wars: Enemy Territory and Half Life 2: Episode 2 (expected Q2 2007).

But what of performance now? Running our high-end Call of Duty 2 test, at 1600 x 1200 with 4x AA and 8x 8AF we saw an average of 49fps from the GTX and 43fps from the GTS. By comparison, Nvidia’s dual-GPU 7950 GX2 scored 50fps and Ati’s X1950 XTX scored 53fps. This is a crippling test and Ati’s prowess comes largely from the massive memory bandwidth its GDDR 4 RAM affords – essential in such a texture-heavy game. Most other cards struggle to average 40fps.

In Far Cry things were, well, a little different. At 1600 x 1200 with 8x AA and HDR rendering turned on the 8800 GTX averaged a staggering 99fps. The GTS averaged 71fps. Ati’s best ever score is 57fps and the 7950 GX2 scored 66fps.

So these are tremendously powerful cards but, once again, there’s price to consider. Unless you have the vision of a fly (and a specially-modified, very high-frequency monitor) most people simply don’t need to be running these framerates. They’re utterly pointless for 1280 x 1024 gaming and there’s little point in future proofing because, at the rate graphics cards drop in price every week, by the time you need a DirectX 10 card, the $938 and $769 asking prices will have plummeted.

MSI includes power adapters, two D-Sub converters, cables for composite, component and S-Video, CyberLink DVD software and Serious Sam II. Asus bundles GTI Racing, Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, 3DMark 06, a D-Sub converter and a TV-component cable.

But if you want 1600 x 1200 gaming now, we still recommend plumping for a $519 X1900 XT. However, with new, next-gen games on the horizon, it’s probably worth waiting.