NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX - How's the performance?

Lots of reviews of the new GeForce 9800 GTX graphics card from NVIDIA are crawling the web today. Lets take a look at some reviews to see how this new card performs. AnandTech has published their review over here and says its a pretty decent card with a price point of around $300.

The smaller die size of the G92 based 9800 GTX takes away one victory AMD had over NVIDIA: the more expensive 8800 Ultra was slower than AMD’s top of the line. Without significantly improving (and sometimes hurting) performance over the 8800 Ultra (because they didn’t really need to with the 9800 GX2 in their pocket), NVIDIA has brought more competition to AMD’s lineup, which is definitely not something they will be happy about.

It is nice to have this card come in at the $300 price point with decent performance, but the most exciting thing about it is the fact that picking up two of them will give you better performance than a single 9800 GX2 for the same amount of money. Two of them can even start to get by in Crysis with Very High settings (though it might offer a better experience with one or tow features turned down a bit).

The guys from HardOCP took a look at the GeForce 9800 GTX from BFG, you can read their report over here. They say the GeForce 9800 GTX is a good product but nothing to get really excited about.

The BFGTech GeForce 9800 GTX is a good product but it's not breaking any performance barriers or redefining our gaming experiences. The bundle is nothing to get excited about, but the video card itself is capable. The only problem we see is that the 9800 GTX isn't truly superior to the 8800 GTX it is intended to replace in terms of real world gaming performance. A “new” product that comes to market is usually considerably better performing than its predecessor, at least in the high end GPU space. That is not the case here. There is more fancy “green” technology in this 9800 GTX, which is of course a step in the right direction, but it does not shift any performance paradigms.

The 9800 GTX is ever-so-slightly faster than the GeForce 8800 GTX in most games and in at least one game, not. The GeForce 9800 GTX is showing up in stock this morning at Newegg for $329.99 from five add-in card partners. This seems to be a good value on this card and it is selling a bit lower than we expected on launch day. Comparing this directly to GeForce 8800 GTX stock we see the least expensive one of those selling for $289.99 after $50 MIR. That is simply a hell of a deal on an EVGA 8800 GTX. Get it while you can.