Unified shaders on a shoestring? You can bet your bump maps on it.
Priced at a mere £145, MSI's NX8600GTS - built around Nvidia's G84 core - is the first properly midrange-priced DX10-compatible card on the shelves. And there's still no competition for Nvidia's eight-series.
As ever, we're propping up the bar and gorging on breadsticks while ATI's offering dallies at home, deciding which lippy to wear. Stood up or fed up? Take your pick.
While team green's rapidly maturing stream-powered DX10 cores gains greater market penetration, we can't help but feel that ATI's New Hope will struggle to compete. This time next month, we'll know the true power of R600 though, and we'll be the first to ejaculate streams of bunting if it turns out to be the killer app for DX10.
In the meantime, Nvidia's board-manufacturing partners are laying on a feast of midrange DX10 fancies, starting with the 8600GTS (more on the others in the family, namely the 8600GT and the 8500GT, next month).
The first thing you notice about the 8600 is that, unlike most modern cards, it's refreshingly compact and quiet. This little fellow is the same width and length as its DX9-based spiritual predecessor, the 7600GT.
And MSI's take on the 8600 comes pre-tweaked to run a little faster straight from the box. The standard core/memory speeds for the G84 core - housed in any vanilla 8600 card - are 675Mhz and 2GHz, whereas the NX8600GTS runs at 690MHz on the core, while the memory shoulders electrons around at a refreshingly spry 2.1GHz. Hardly a nut-clutcher of an increase, but every little helps.
Power play
Architecturally, it's not far removed, although notably less powerful, than its big brothers in the 8800 range. The core is composed of 64 stream processes - compare this with the 8800GTS' 96, or the GTX's 128.
And not only does it feature less memory, 256MB of DDR3 to be exact, but the memory bus is just 128-bit, compared with the 256-bit bus of the 8800s.
Memory bandwidth is also low, at 28.8GB/s. The X1950 offers 44.1GB/s, and that's a six-month old DX9 card. On paper, none of it seems to paint a pretty picture.
