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If you have always wished you could own a GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB or GeForce 8800 GT but never could afford one, well, check out the new GeForce 9600 GT. NVIDIA’s targeting this card at those who want better performance at a more affordable price. Is it really as good as they made it out to be? Read on and find out.

The NVIDIA GeForce 9 series of graphics cards has finally arrived! Today, NVIDIA is announcing the GeForce 9600 GT video card and while it may not be as anticipated as previous generations, it still marks a significant turning point. Usually, a new series is kicked off by the fastest card in the bunch, but this time around NVIDIA is launching the GeForce series at the heart of the discrete graphics market, the $169-189 price range.

For roughly $150 the GeForce 9600 GT is one of the best price versus performance graphics cards on the street today. The card are looking at today is the PNY Verto GeForce 9600 GT and it features 512MB of GDDR3 frame buffer memory with a 650 MHz core clock. The PNY Verto GeForce 9600 GT is ready for PCI Express 2.0 motherboards and supports NVIDIA SLI technology. Read on as we compare it to an equally priced ATI Radeon HD 3870 512MB graphics card to see how it fairs.

Priced at $279 there's a new GTX 260 in town and it's got one purpose: to compete with the Radeon HD 4870. NVIDIA manages to close the performance gap with this part but AMD holds onto a price advantage. If you're tired of definitive victories in the GPU race, today is your day....

When the NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GSO was originally released in April of 2008 it was priced slightly lower than the GeForce 9600 GT as it had lower clock speeds, but oddly enough it came with more shader processors. The EVGA e-GeForce 9600 GSO Dual-Slot Edition had an MSRP of $164.99 when it first came out, but is now just $49 after rebate and boy can it fold!

Yesterday NVIDIA launched a highly competitive sub-$200 GPU. AMD responded by cutting prices on its 3800-series GPUs. Find out which camp offers you the best price-performance ratio. We also take a look at the highest factory overclocked GeForce 9600 GT.

There is no denying it, ATI have done a fantastic job with their high end X1900 cards, and the XTX variant arguably holds the performance crown in a single card configuration, besting the 7900 GTX for raw power and image quality. Not all is perfect for ATI however, and the problem highlights itself when you take a look at there entire product range from top to bottom. Moving to Nvidia's line up for a moment, I can easily name a new card for each market sector in a flat second - the 7900 GTX for the high end, the 7900 GT for mid to high, and the 7600 GT for the mid range.

The Windows Vista driver development for the GeForce 8 cards seems to be stopping with the ForceWare Release 169, the most recent of which is the ForceWare 169.44 driver. NVIDIA has restricted the use of Release 174 ForceWare driver only to the new GeForce 9 series cards. The recently-released GeForce 9600 GT is the only example of the new card series. If you try to install ForceWare 174 using a GeForce 8 series card, it won't allow you to do so, stating that no compatible graphics card were found.

There is no denying it, ATI have done a fantastic job with their high end X1900 cards, and the XTX variant arguably holds the performance crown in a single card configuration, besting the 7900 GTX for raw power and image quality. Not all is perfect for ATI however, and the problem highlights itself when you take a look at there entire product range from top to bottom. Moving to Nvidia's line up for a moment, I can easily name a new card for each market sector in a flat second - the 7900 GTX for the high end, the 7900 GT for mid to high, and the 7600 GT for the mid range.