Wowzers eVGA .. that's a nice way to launch a product for sure .. impressive stuff people. I don't think that the high-end segment has ever been so fast in terms of development as we have seen over the past year. The manufacturers want to be on the number one spot. Hey it's like sports ... take Formula One for example. Everybody remembers Renault or Ferrari on that number one spot .. but who was on second or third place ... two years ago ? Precisely, branding is what this is about.

Now despite the fact that I expected a GPU with more pixel pipelines NVIDIA did some very clever stuff. The chip design somehow got more efficient due to the new fabrication process, there is a much higher clock frequency and also faster memory, yet it has less transistors. Less transistors means saving money to produce the silicon and that's exactly what I enjoyed so much about this product. It's again the fastest flagship graphics card available (marginally here and there with the X1900 XTX from ATI though) yet it's price ... yeah that's what I like the most. You want to know why ? For the past two years I have been complaining that high-end graphics card get more and more expensive and that only the rich are able to buy these cards. The (and I stated this once) graphics industry would be killing off it's own business as people don't have the money left to buy the actual games. Now performance wise this product is lined up against the Radeon X1900 XTX and at the moment of writing this article (Monday the 6th of March) I started receiving emails from ATI. They are and have been counter-reacting and the X1900 XTX for example now drops below the 500 USD pricetag also. That's how fierce this business is.

So this product is a decent amount faster than the 7800 GTX 512MB yet it's priced 150 USD cheaper, now how can you lose on that huh ? Two very large thumbs up here for whoever made that call as finally the industry has been listening to what we the press and you the consumers have been shouting for quite a while now. Very respectful and this will set a new trend in the graphics arena for sure.

Stability - you know what I love so much about products like these ? I uninstall old drivers, insert the card, install new drivers, do a reboot and bam .. everything works as planned. I have much respect for that, as usual everything worked straight out of the box. Not once did we have a system lockup or for that matter other weird driver bugs or anything. I can be short about it then, it's stable as a house.

Now then, gaming performance ... this little focker is fast for sure ! It's offers an incredible amount of flexibility. If you like to play your games at 1920x1200 like I do then you do not have to compromise at all. Turn on 4xAA and sixteen levels of anisotropic filtering, the card will still push well over 80 frames per second (on average) in Quake 4 for example. So I really do not need to go into much detail to describe how well games play with this card.

What this review lacks due to time constraints is mentioning HD content versus the fact that the graphics core can en/decode it :) HD (movies/series/multimedia) playback is fantastic with the help of PureVideo (which you need to buy for 20 USD). I really love how NVIDIA is working so hard on this matter. Unfortunately we think that this card is not HDCP ready (we're not 100% sure just yet) ... According to the HDCP specification, high-definition video content that is transported using a HDCP-DVI signal will be encrypted to prevent copying. This means that future encrypted HD media can not be decoded properly with this card.

HDCP support is the biggest flop in the industry right now, that industry should be ashamed of all the fuzz. People are buying gear worth hundreds of dollars and euros only to find out that future HD material will output a black screen or a cut off lower resolution playback of the HD content in the near future, and that's nasty.

In combo with the new drivers you can now also decode High Definition H.264 streams. H.264 is a compression algorithm used to transmit video efficiently between endpoints. This algorithm is seen as the replacement for its predecessor, H.263. What is different about H.264 is that it promises to deliver high quality video, H.264 also enables very high quality encoding, producing better results than even MPEG2 and of course HDTV levels.