Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX+

With every new card from ATI pushing Nvidia further onto the back foot right now, it's clear the GeForce line needs a winner. While the rather uninspired naming of the 9800 GTX+ may suggest it'll bring little more than a mild speed boost and a price rise, one small detail made us sit up and take notice.

The 9800 GTX+ is Nvidia's first GeForce card to make the move to the 55nm manufacturing process. In theory this should mean lower power consumption and cooler running than existing 65nm parts, and the success of ATI's 55nm Radeon HD 4000-series suggests it's a move Nvidia should have made sooner.

In terms of core specifications, the GTX+ is the minor improvement you'd expect: the core clock is boosted to 738MHz from the 675MHz of the standard GTX, and the shader clock is up to 1,836MHz from 1,690MHz. The rest remains the same: 128 stream processors, 512MB of memory running at 2.2GHz with a 256-bit bus width, and a transistor count of 754 million.

Given these clock speeds, it follows that performance should be up by a little under 10%, so we fired up Crysis to find out. Low settings were never going to be a problem, and Medium passed without a hitch - a score of 56fps is more than playable.

High settings were the point at which the original GTX began to run close to the boundaries of playability - it managed 32fps at 1,600 x 1,200 - but the GTX+ pushed that to a more comfortable 35fps, an improvement of 9%, as expected.

Very High settings are still just beyond the capabilities of the GTX+, as an average of 25fps demonstrates, but that's close enough to be playable if you lower a few detail settings. Call of Juarez is another very demanding test but the 9800 GTX+ handled it pretty well, scoring 32fps on Medium settings, and 23fps on High.

So the improvement over the 9800 GTX is about as great as we'd predicted, but it's the GTX+'s pricing that will determine its success. Nvidia has been slashing the cost of its cards of late in reaction to ATI's aggressive pricing, so we expected a price for the GTX+ somewhere around £150 - but it's actually hit retailers at prices closer to £120 plus VAT. That's a tremendous saving over the original card and pretty much makes it obsolete.

It also positions the 9800 GTX+ midway between ATI's HD 4850 (around £100 plus VAT) and HD 4870 (£150 plus VAT). This isn't such good news for Nvidia, however: the cheaper HD 4850 beat its average by 7fps in our Crysis Medium test and matched it exactly at High settings. The HD 4870, on the other hand, scored our highest ever Call of Juarez average and beat the GTX+ by a clear 4fps in our demanding High settings Crysis test.

This puts the 9800 GTX+ on to a bit of loser before it's even got going. It failed to beat the HD 4850 in any of our benchmarks, yet ATI's card is £20 cheaper and uses a single-height cooler, making it a far more attractive option. It's early days yet so the price may fall in the coming months, and it'll certainly have to if Nvidia wants to halt its current run of bad form.

Author: David Bayon