I was perusing some of the benchmarks. It isn't just a little faster, its absurdly faster than anything else on the market. Although it is expensive, it's almost as fast as dual-ATI's so factor that into consideration.

The conclusion of one of the articles was that unless you are using a 24" monitor to play games the card might be overkill because running at anything less than 1920x1200 will be CPU limited rather than GPU limited. Check out these benchmarks @ 1920x1200. I will list 3 numbers. The first is for the 8800, the second is for the GeForce 7950 GX2 and the third is for the ATI Radeon X1900 XTX:

Prey: 95, 66, 63 fps
Half-Life 2: Lost Coast: 166, 136, 143
F.E.A.R: 117, 75, 63



Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion...this one is pretty telling because ESO is a well-known GPU hog. Additionally, the other cards were so far behind the 8800 that they had to turn down some detail to compare them. For this one the 8800 is a MAX DETAILS, 8x AA, 16x AF. The 7950 is at 0x AA, 16x AF, medium grass, medium fade/specular; The X1950 is at 2x AA 16x HQ AF:

34.2, 36.3, 32.9

If you've played EOS before and tried turning everything on you get an idea of just how powerful the 8800 is. To quote the article

We literally set the game's settings to their maximum, including enabling HDR before turning 8xQAA with transparency multi-sampling on for good measure. Add that to the fact that we've turned 16xAF on, and you've got one hell of a gaming experience...ATI's image quality crown is no more - the GeForce 8800 GTX has better anisotropic filtering with absolutely no angle dependency on its anisotropic filtering algorithm.

Even upping ESO's resolution to 2560x1600 the 8800 was still able to pull in a framerate of 40fps by changing AA to 2xTSS.

Company of Heroes. Here the 8800 is a max details, 16xTMS AA and 16xAF. The 7950 is 0xAA and 8xAF medium-high details, no post processing. The x1950 is at 2x AA and 8xHQ high details:

31.2, 34.9, 31.2.


And the one we've all been waiting for, Battlefield 2142: 8800 max details 16xQTSS, 16xAF. 7950 max details 4xAA, 16xAF. X1950 4xAA, 16xHQ:

48.3, 59.4, 50.3.

At 1920x1200, Battlefield 2142 looked awesome with 16xQ AA with transparency super-sampling enabled. The GeForce 8800 GTX simply tore through the game without any performance hiccups whatsoever - we spent some time playing the game online with the card too, finding it to maintain its smoothness at these quality settings. The unified shader architecture seems to really help with smoothness in this title.

Both the GeForce 7950 GX2 and Radeon X1950 XTX were playable at the same quality settings, but the GeForce 7950 GX2's image quality was pretty pathetic compared to the Radeon X1950 XTX and GeForce 8800 GTX.

All info came from these articles:


http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...2054230,00.asp
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/200...gtx_g80/1.html
http://www.techreport.com/reviews/20...0/index.x?pg=1