For the last few years Nvidia has been trying to develop fastest solutions for the premium and top-performance sectors of the graphics card market. The consequences of Nvidia’s focus on advanced single-chip graphics cards have already been discussed, particularly in our review of the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2. Seeing its objective in the making of highest-performance GPUs targeted at the premium market sector, Nvidia had to face new challenges. Installing the G200 core (GT200, NV55) on graphics cards cheaper than $200 is not justifiable from an economical or technical point of view. The manufacturing cost of such a product cannot be low enough due to the complexity of the PCB and the relatively low chip yield. As a result, mass production of such products cannot be profitable. Thus, Nvidia has to equip its mainstream cards with previous-generation cores that are overall inferior to the newest graphics cores from ATI, the graphics division of Advanced Micro Devices.

The G92 is one of such long-lived cores – it had its first birthday on the 29th of October. This chip was originally installed on the GeForce 8800 GT series and replaced the G80 in the newer version of GeForce 8800 GTS, the last-year hit among gamers. The G92 took part in Nvidia’s attempt to create new-generation top-performance dual-processor solutions and also became the heart of the new single-processor flagship GeForce 9800 GTX. The latter card was very good but did not reign long as ATI finally struck back. Its RV770 processor made expensive G92-based solutions uncompetitive in a moment. For example, the original price of the GeForce 9800 GTX was $349 whereas the Radeon HD 4850 delivered the same performance for only $199.

Anyway, the G92 is not yet discarded completely. It just follows the fate of most GPUs after the next generation of graphics processors arrives. It has found its abode in inexpensive mainstream cards, transitioning from 65nm to 55nm tech process on the way. We have explained the reason above: the G200 is too sophisticated and expensive to be used in $200 or cheaper products. Therefore we are quite sure the G92 will have a long life yet in its many variations until the arrival of a new generation of Nvidia’s mainstream GPUs.

This review is concerned with the GeForce 9800 GT graphics card that is meant to fill in the gap between the GeForce 9800 GTX/GTX+ and the GeForce 9600 GT. At a recommended price of $129, this graphics card looks appealing in theory. We now want to check it out in practice and see what performance it can offer to an economical gamer.