Tomorrow, the new flagship video cards by nVidia will be released to much expectation... Too much, it seems. Today, the NDA has apparently been lifted on the specifications and performance of these new cards and benchmark articles are cropping up all over the place. (Here, here and here, to name three.) The results? It is definitely faster than all single-GPU cards out there, but when it comes to the 9800GX2 (a two-in-one card) and SLI setups, it's... Less than stunning.

Let me be the first to say that it's pretty incredible that nVidia has squeezed the power of two cards into one. That is nothing less than amazing and will do wonders for the future, when the price of the cards go down and the driver maturity goes up. Two GT280s in SLI far overpowers any two previous cards... Except, of course, two 9800GX2s, because that's technically four cards.

Mostly, this post is for myself. I'm organizing some thoughts here, for my new PC. (While I'm bed-ridden because of a bum leg... Ouch.) I budgeted $600 for a single new GT280. Expensive, yes... Ghastly expensive, actually. But I'm aiming for performance, and when you figure that two 9800GTXs in SLI is going to be around $550, an extra 50 isn't going to be too bad, especially when the GT280 is on par with the two cards. But now that the GT280 is more or less out now, the price is a little higher than we all expected: $650. That's REALLY expensive.

I'm a gamer, but I'm also very... obsessive-compulsive. My laptop runs at a resolution of 1920x1200. It's enough room for everything I like to do, and it's perfect for viewing 1080p (1920x1080). As such, I'm not interested in playing games at the astronomical resolutions of 2560x1600. Not only that, but you need a (massive) monitor to display those numbers. I want a simple (small and cheap) monitor that quite conveniently displays 1920x1200. I'm happy with that! Now, based on the benchmarks from AnandTech, the GT280 is SLOWER at those resolutions. It really shines at 2560x1600, but only because the older cards choke on the sheer colossal amounts of information. That link shows Crysis, and be sure to check the second image and look for GeForce 8800 GT SLI. 37.4 frames per second against the GT280's 34.3 FPS. The GT280 has a lot of extra features such as CUDA (which allows you to actually use the GPUs for applications like encoding and folding) and PhysX processing (which allows programs to calculate physics math far quicker), but both of those are absolutely brand new and nothing uses them yet, except for a few demo applications. According to NewEgg, I can get a 8800 GT for about $180. Multiply by two for SLI and that's merely $360. HALF the cost of a GT280 and BETTER graphics performance. (I could even operate Tri-SLI 8800 GTs at $540, and that's still $100 less than a GT280... With far better performance. But I don't want Tri-SLI, yet, because that's generally considered to also be absolutely brand new, and the performance doesn't scale by 3x like regular SLI does 2x on most games.)

Oblivion is the game I really want to play at full throttle. My laptop, the most powerful computer I have at the moment, only plays Oblivion on LOWEST SETTINGS at 640x480 to get a stable frame rate. That's positively dismal. But again, AnandTech's review puts 8800 GT SLI at 56.2 FPS at 1920x1200 and it puts the GT280 at 51.1 FPS at the same resolution. Not MUCH worse, and I still think there's great potential for power here, seeing as how a single GT280 can be neck-to-neck with two 8800 GTs, but... For twice the cost, I don't think it's a wise decision to go for a GT280, especially since I don't plan on playing games higher than 1920x1200, which is where more RAM and power usually shines. Sub-2560x1600? Yesterday's cards perform just fine.

However, there's the deal of what's called "micro-stuttering" that comes with SLI cards. I'm not familiar with it entirely, and it doesn't seem to be a huge deal, because there's a MASSIVE SLI user base, but it seems to rise from two cards trying to work in tandem and they can't quite get the FPS in sync and you get little stutters every now and then... I'm just going by a comment I've heard. One comment. Not really much to go on, but I've heard about stuttering when it comes to the 9800GX2s, because they have FAR less RAM to work with, and when you run it at higher resolutions, the RAM fills up and the card bogs down for a split second. I haven't heard of this occurring on other cards before. Because of that, I'm not interested in a 9800GX2, but also because they're almost as expensive as a GT280. Then again, this stuttering might also stem from people playing at 2560x1600, which, once again, I don't plan on doing this time around, so that's not an issue for me.

So after much deliberation, I may settle on 2 EVGA GeForce 8800 GT in SLI for a lowly $360... Or 2 EVGA GeForce 8800 GTS in SLI for $488? Maybe 2 EVGA GeForce 9800 GTX in SLI for $538... Yes, I've been looking at more charts since I wrote the first sentence. I was looking at power consumption charts and those cards sure do enjoy sucking the energy even when they're not DOING anything. The GT280 has advanced power management that reduces power to 25 watts when it's idly drawing the Windows desktop. I don't know... I'll have to do more research... The price of the GT280 might even drop by the time I need to buy a card and all this thought and preparation will be for naught. (I have, after all, budgeted $600 for the card, so it's really not completely out of the question.)