Nvidia's 9600GT

After hearing about the 9600 over at Engadget last week i decided to go in search of some reviews. So i headed over to http://www.tomshardwarwe.com/ to see if they had gotten their hands on one of Nvidias latest budget cards and as usual, they did.

The main reason for the release of this card was to directly challenge ATI's HD 3870 in the budget department. Giving Nvidias large presence in the budget market i wasn't sure why they felt they needed to release a new card onto the market.

After reading through the review and looking at the various benchmarks it appears that Nvidias 9600GT didn't achieve the goal it was set out to do. In the majority of the benchmarks the HD3870 out performs the 9600GT although, it was only a small margin. Included in the benchmarks were two of the 8800GT series which, to no surprise out performed all of the other budget cards including the new 9600GT

To give you a rough idea, the 8800GT outperformed (on average) the 9600GT by 10 - 20 FPS. Which is quite a substantial amount especially in the higher resolutions with the filters applied.

Pricing :

Nvidia 9600GT ~$250 - $400
Nvidia 8800GT ~$250 - $400
ATI HD 3870 ~$280 - $400

Considering the prices and the performance, the 8800GT is the clear winner with the HD3870 following close behind. The 9600GT was really a waste and unless some new software releases boost it's performance it will remain totally outclassed.