Conclusions
You've seen the results for yourself, so you pretty much know what I'm going to say. The 8800 GT does a very convincing imitation of the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB when running the latest games, even at high resolutions and quality settings, with antialiasing and high-quality texture filtering. Its G92 GPU has all of the GeForce 8800 goodness we've come to appreciate in the past year or so, including DX10 support, coverage-sampled antialiasing, and top-notch overall image quality. The card is quiet and draws relatively little power compared to its competitors, and it will only occupy a single slot in your PC. That's a stunning total package, sort of what it would be like if Jessica Biel had a brain.

With pricing between $199 and $249, I find it hard to recommend anything else—especially since we found generally playable settings at 2560x1600 resolution in some of the most intensive new games (except for Crysis, which is in a class by itself.) I expect we may see some more G92-based products popping up in the coming weeks or months, but for most folks, this will be the version to have.

The one potential fly in the ointment for the 8800 GT is its upcoming competition from AMD. As we were preparing this review, the folks from AMD contacted us to let us know that the RV670 GPU is coming soon, and that they expect it to bring big increases in performance and power efficiency along with it. In fact, the AMD folks sound downright confident they'll have the best offering at this price point when the dust settles, and they point to several firsts they'll be offering as evidence. With RV670, they expect to be the first to deliver a GPU fabbed on a 55nm process, the first to offer a graphics processor compliant with the DirectX 10.1 spec, and the first to support four-way multi-GPU configs in Windows Vista. DirectX 10.1 is a particular point of emphasis for AMD, because it allows for some nifty things like fast execution of global illumination algorithms and direct developer control of antialiasing sample patterns. Those enhancements, of course, will be pretty much academic if RV670-based cards don't provide as compelling a fundamental mix of performance, image quality, and power efficiency as the GeForce 8800 GT. We'll know whether they've achieved that very soon.

This concludes our first look at the 8800 GT, but it's not the end of our evaluation process. I've been knee-deep in CPUs over the past month or so, culminating today with our review of the 45nm Core 2 Extreme QX9650 processor today, and that's kept me from spending all of the time with the 8800 GT that I'd like. Over the next week or so, I'll be delving into multi-GPU performance, some image quality issues, HD video playback, more games, and more scaling tests. We may have yet another new video card for you shortly, too.