Test :Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX (page 14: Conclusion)

Conclusion

By continuously offering the strict minimum compared to the competition and also coming close to the acceptable limit in playing with product names, Nvidia ends up disappointing us. The fact that GeForce 8 architecture is still very efficient is probably the source of the problem. Almost 18 months after its introduction, it continues to have the lead in terms of performances as AMD has not yet been able to produce a more powerful GPU than the G80 which equipped the first GeForce 8800s.

For this reason, Nvidia has not seen the interest in aggressively developing a higher performance GPU. In the meantime, they are content with the G92, a more economically efficient version which enables reducing production costs while at the same time improving profitability. In parallel, marketing and sales need new products despite everything else, and therefore there was the creation of the GeForce 9 line. This new family doesn’t offer anything new compared to GeForce 8s other than the catchy name.

Without a new high end GPU, we could have thought that Nvidia wouldn’t launch a x800 GTX type graphic card in the GeForce 9 line, because even if there is nothing new in terms of functions, we would have expected higher performances from a product in April 2008 than in November 2006. Nvidia first of all opted for a dual GPU card, the GeForce 9800 GX2. To this we say, ‘’Sure, why not?’’, even if it was only half convincing due to limited memory. However, they also seemed to think that there is no limit for the company which dominates the market. Despite all else, it was decided to release a GeForce 9800 GTX without having a better adapted GPU to such a product. For this reason, we are in a situation where the GeForce 8800 GTS 512 MB is more or less renamed the GeForce 9800 GTX.

Of course, the card is slightly overclocked, has added triple SLI support and is 3 cm longer, but the 8% gain in performances has trouble covering up this maneuver. It’s all the more so true that in the end the "new generation" card is sometimes behind the GeForce 8800 GTX in complex situations given memory limited to 512 MB and to a 256 bit bus versus 768 MB and 384 bits. You may have gathered that even if the performances/price ratio is well in the average, the GeForce 9800 GTX seems like a bad April Fool’s Day joke to us…