Up until recently, the need for DirectX 10 hardware has been debatable - only a few titles have even supported DirectX 10, and performance has often been too slow to warrant consideration. With the holiday season in full swing, however, top-end DirectX 9 hardware from last year is now beginning to seriously struggle on many titles. Recent releases such as Crysis and Hellgate: London are just the tip of the iceberg. DirectX 10 mode might still be too much for many graphics cards to handle, but the latest DX10 hardware is also substantially faster at running DX9 code. The following slide shows the growing list of DX10 enabled games.
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Huxley and Call of Duty 4 could also be included in that list, and there are many more titles scheduled for release in the next year that will continue to push GPU requirements.
So just how fast is the GeForce 8800M GTX? As mentioned, we were unable to test one in person at this point in time, but we will provide detailed results as soon as possible. In the meantime, here are a few quick slides from NVIDIA showing preliminary performance results. Note that we are not in control of the test variables for the following slides, and the first 3DMark06 slide includes three different CPU speeds (2.8GHz for 8800M, 2.2GHz for 8700M, and 2.0GHz for 7950 GTX). As gaming continues to be predominantly GPU limited, however, these baseline performance estimates should at least whet your appetite.
It appears that we should be able to get approximately twice the performance of the GeForce Go 7950 GTX (and more than twice the 8700M GT) with the 8800M GTX, which brings laptops back into striking range of desktop computers. A single 8800M GTX should also be roughly the same speed as GeForce Go 7950 GTX SLI, without the hassles of SLI drivers and profiles. For those that simply demand top performance, we can expect 8800M SLI configurations to improve performance again by up to 80% - just don't worry about battery life on such notebooks.
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