Introduction
At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, we have to point readers to yet another updated report on the state of the desktop graphics market. The scores are in for fanboys from both sides. Despite the generally optimistic outlook many of us had about the Radeon HD 3800 series, these cards failed to halt NVIDIA as it plowed to gain a massive 71% of the discrete graphics card market in the fourth quarter of 2007.
Overall, the desktop market has actually grown quite spectacularly, so all those doomsayers predicting the end of PC gaming may just have to wait a while longer. A small decrease in total revenue however from the third to fourth quarter hints that the growth is likely fueled by a drop in prices, the timing of which suggests that the arrival of the popular and attractively priced GeForce 8800 GT may have been the catalyst for this growth. If true, it's a pretty big sign of the market potential of consumers genuinely wanting more graphics horsepower at more sane prices instead of the super high-end stuff that costs more than an average console or even whole PC systems.
The arrival of the mid-range GeForce 9600 GT will go a long way towards pulling in the mainstream consumer. Although 'mainstream', we have seen it do quite decently in the latest games, provided that you're not overly ambitious. The 256-bit memory bus and 512MB frame memory certainly helps raise the bar on what constitutes mainstream and while ATI's Radeon HD 3800 series is capable of matching the newcomer on performance, prices have to be adjusted to stay competitive. Consumers will definitely benefit from this, though we can't say the same for ATI's (AMD) revenue.
MSI's overclocked GeForce 9600 GT comes with its Live Update technology but some of the other usual features like D.O.T and CoreCell are not found on this card.
Graphics Engine
- NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT GPU (G94)
- 505 million transistors
- 3D GPU clock = 700MHz
- 64 Stream Processors at 1680MHz
- NVIDIA Unified Architecture
- GigaThread technology
- Full support for Microsoft DirectX 10
- Geometry shaders
- Geometry instancing
- Streamed output
- Shader Model 4.0
- Full 128-bit floating point precision through the entire rendering pipeline
- NVIDIA Lumenex Technology
- 16x full screen anti-aliasing
- Transparent multisampling and transparent supersampling
- 16x angle independent anisotropic filtering
- 128-bit floating point high dynamic-range (HDR) lighting with anti-aliasing
- 32-bit per component floating point texture filtering and blending
- Advanced lossless compression algorithms for color, texture, and z-data
- Support for normal map compression
- Z-cull
- Early-Z
- NVIDIA Quantum Effects Technology
- Advanced shader processors architected for physics computation
- Simulate and render physics effects on the graphics processor
- NVIDIA SLI Technology
- NVIDIA PureVideo HD Technology
- Dedicated on-chip video processor (VP2)
- High-definition H.264, VC-1, MPEG2 and WMV9 decode acceleration
- Advanced spatial-temporal de-interlacing
- HDCP capable
- Spatial-Temporal De-Interlacing
- Noise Reduction
- Edge Enhancement
- Bad Edit Correction
- Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
- High-quality scaling
- Video color correction
- Microsoft Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) support
- Advanced Display Functionality
- Two dual-link DVI outputs for digital flat panel display resolutions up to 2560x1600
- Dual integrated 400MHz RAMDACs for analog display resolutions up to and including 2048x1536 at 85Hz
- Integrated HDTV encoder provides analog TV-output (Component/Composite/S-Video) up to 1080i resolution
- NVIDIA nView multi-display technology capability
- 10-bit display processing
- Built for Windows Vista
- Full DirectX 10 support
- Dedicated graphics processor powers the new Windows Vista Aero 3D user interface
- VMR-based video architecture
- Designed for PCI Express 2.0
- Designed for high-speed GDDR3 memory
- 256-bit memory interface
- 512MB Graphics DDR3 SDRAM
- Default clock rate of 950MHz (effective speed of 1900MHz DDR)
- Dual 400MHz RAMDACs that support resolutions of 2048x1536@85Hz
- Dual-link DVI capability to drive displays of up to 2560x1600
- 1 x mini-DIN connector (for Video-out)
- 2 x DVI-I connector (HDCP Ready)
- Driver support for Microsoft Windows Vista/9x/ME/2000/XP/XP MCE/XP Pro x64, Linux and Macintosh OS (including OS X)
- MSI Beyond Multimedia (Drivers & Utilties)
- PCI Express x16 2.0 compliant
- Dedicated 6-pin PCIe Molex power connector required (not shared or split)
- Power supply rated for 400W or higher recommended by NVIDIA
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