Interesting news.
I'm in the market for a upgrade for my 7900GTX and it looks like the waiting game is on again.
-X

I can't be the only one who finds their new naming conventions completely retarded. Like nossid says, they're rehashing popular old-gen names already used by ATI. Their little "codes", no one will remember what each letter means. Are video cards now being named by monkeys on typewriters?

Keep dreaming.

Well, it's not like there's an infinite amount of cool numbers out there, mister "Think of another number"! You clearly don't understand the graphics card business!

I wonder if this is the same tactic Intel used, trying to hijack the word 'core' as a brand name... trying to make it hard to talk about ATI's older stuff?

Naw, probably just stupidity.

That would work fine if there was only one graphic card company, but as soon as you get competition, you'll run into the numbers inflation thing. That's why Windows NT went to 'version 3.11' right away, because nobody would trust a 1.0 product from Microsoft... and they didn't want to 'downgrade' from Windows 3.11.

Honestly, after the 9000 series, NVidia should denumber down to "10". The 10.8 GTX, 10.6 GT, etc. Something like that. Because 10800 GTX is just a little silly.

Pyramid 3D FTW!

or the fabulously underrated Verite and vquake!

At this point I think Nvidia should move on to HeForce! (some good co-branding opportunities there)

Well.. now that the spec's are out.. and more importantly Nvidia's "1st Half" 2008 roadmap has been released I have to say I'm greatly disappointed in Nvidia..its one thing to recoup R&D expense by shifting to a longer cycle (18 month at this point.. perhaps longer) with die shrinks and new naming conventions but its another thing to abuse your customer (rabidly loyal at that) base.

The 9800GX2 which replaces the 8800 Ultra is nothing more than the old "SLI on a single card" 7950GX2 revisited again. That was a bad idea back then and its a bad idea today. Horrible Driver support for the 7950GX2 basically raped buyers of that expensive technology and woe to the foolish that actually bought 2 in attempts to "Quad SLI" as not only was driver support abysmal in most cases the Quad SLI performance in specific games was worse than SLI performance.

At the mid range further into 2008 your getting nothing but die shrinks and minimal performance gains over existing cards.. Triple SLI...I suspect will be how Nvidia markets all these cards.. but outside a handful of games and canned benchmarks not much will be really gained.

I urge everyone to stop buying Nvidia cards for the foreseeable future and get ATI 3870's... sure your performance will be 10-15% less in real world use but the long term benefit will outweigh continuing to give Nvidia money to do nothing. Not to mention ATI's drivers have never been better and currently stomp Nvidia in terms of stability and overall game compatibility.

I have to agree with Guru about the drivers. They've gotten MUCH better. You have to have .NET installed for the control panel, which seems a little suboptimal, but the drivers themselves were very stable for me.

I also like the color presentation better on the ATI cards. I had both a 1950 and a 7300 running at the same time (Mac Pro) and was switching back and forth, and I thought the ATI card color reproduction was much nicer. I also though the image was a bit crisper. I think the DVI circuitry on the ATI cards may be a little better.

There was a time when I wouldn't buy ATI if you put a gun to my head, but after being forced to buy one on the Mac Pro, and then running Windows on it -- it was quite nice. And ATI was up to snuff on Vista long, long before NVidia was. Driver quality matters. Trading off a little speed for better drivers has been a good idea since the TNT days. I stuck with NVidia for years, even when they were a little slower. It's odd to be thinking about it the other way around.

Well, I haven't gone that far yet, but I do like ATI's drivers, and wanted to support Guru there.

Whether or not you should go ATI over NVidia... hmm. The 8800GT is an awfully good card.

True, but Malor's point is that they've gotten a ton better, and they've been good to go on Vista for much longer than NVIDIA. Both of which are fair points. ATI's era of driver suckiness has seemingly come to a close. Their long-standing awfulness on Linux has begun turning around as well, with ATI finally embracing open source driver development by releasing some damn specifications.

It's hard to swallow spending $249 on a card that runs Crysis ~25-28% slower than a $269 (EVGA on NewEgg) card. Most other games fall into the 10-15% delta you cite, some even close the gap smaller. But the Crysis gap, and the expectation of encountering another big game in 2008 that replicates the gap, made it impossible for me to pick the 3870.

That said, my wife's PC will almost certainly get a 3850 to replace my old 7600GT that's in there.

Agreed!

Well I think what you would be able to notice is the ability to turn on a few more visual effects while still staying above 30fps. But yeah, I'm not saying the 3870 is garbage by any means. But I still think the 512MB 3850 at $199 is a far more interesting card. It stays on the heels of the 3870 in benchmarks and doesn't fall off the pace with AA enabled like the 256MB version does.

For $50 less than the 3870, I think that's the card to hit if you're looking at something beneath an 8800GT.