I recently accquired the XFX 8800 GTX.The first thing you notice about the card is that it’s friggin’ huge! It’s 10.5 inches long, and takes up two slots worth of space on your motherboard. The design is very sturdy with a solid heatsync and slot fan. Most graphics cards I have seen have put very little emphasis on the stock heat sync and fan, which doesn’t make much sense when you consider how hot a kickin’ GPU can get.
What the card is capable of:
I can basically run Enemy Territory: Quake Wars on set to Maximum. All graphical settings are on their highest (high/ultra) set at 1600×1200 with Antisotropic Filtering set to 16x and Anti-Aliasing set to 8x. Even at this extremely high setting, the game can still hold a steady 60 FPS.
I have yet to try any other games, but I have a feeling that I will be able to run any prior released games at their highest setting. Quake Wars was released October 2nd so it is a very new game that uses some pretty advanced graphics, shadowing, weapons effects, and textures. It is also the only game using megatexture technology, which might actually make it run better than games that use individual textures to cover a complete map.
My experience using this card within Vista has been mediokre. I currently use XP through dualboot for gaming because Vista has a ways to come to be able to run games as fast as Windows XP. Hopefully SP1 for Vista will improve performance enough so that this isn’t an issue.
