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A long time has passed since the launch of the 8800 GPU and lots of gamers were wondering what does the Santa Clara giant have up its sleeve to beat the HD 3870X2 threat.

The wait and the speculations are finally over: 9600GT has arrived and, according to NVIDIA, it is "largest single-generation performance jump in the company’s history." That means more than 90% performance increase compared to comparable 8800 series video-cards.

How did the boys come up with this conclusion? Simple: they've blown the dust off of Monolith's F.E.A.R. (yeah, the game that came out in October 2005...), they've installed it on two different configurations and... that's it! One configuration had the new 9600 GT, and the other had the equivalent, meaning an 8800GTS. Both specs included 2GB of RAM, an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX 6850 and Windows Vista. Running at 1600X1200, with full screen Anti-Aliasing (16X) and Anisotropic Filtering, the slow-motion packed title reached 30 frames-per-second with an 8800GTS and 65 fps with a 9600GT. That means a 116% increase in performance, just for that game alone, which could be pretty impressive, if it hadn't been for the fact that the Lithtech Engine (that powers F.E.A.R.) is more than 4 years old...

Anyways, here are the technical delicacies that NVIDIA indulges us with:
designed for the new PCI express 2.0 standard, but compatibility with PCIe 1.0 standard too64 stream processors, each running at 1625MHzmemory clock set to 900MHz (so 1800 overall)memory amount reaching 512MB256-bit memory interfaceimproved performance-per-wattenhanced compression efficiencymemory bandwidth: 57.6GB/stexture fill rate: 20.8 billion/secThe GeForce 9600 GT also improves high-definition video playback, while the new programmable video-processing engine takes on all of the high definition H.264 video decoding, freeing the CPU to perform other tasks, thus significantly reducing power consumption, heat, and noise.

The 9600GT GPU-powered video-cards are expected to retail for less than $250, but no official announcement concerning price has been made.All we want to see though is Crysis running on 9600GT and only then we'll decide if it's worth the money...