If a $600 graphics card isn’t in this year’s budget, a $450 card may not sound better. The Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS is the least expensive DirectX 10-compatible GPU on the market. And the performance comparisons we are making today against ATI’s cards and Nvidia’s previous-generation 7900 family are with DirectX nine and OpenGL games.

The largest architectural change the GeForce 8800 cards introduce isn’t the common generational move to a smaller producing process–both are 90nm cards like those of the GeForce 7900 family–but, rather, Nvidia’s new unified design.

Rather than dedicated pixel shaders and dedicated zenith shaders, the GeForce 8800 cards feature what Nvidia calls stream processors, which can be dynamically allocated to zenith, pixel, geometry, or physics calculations. The result’s a more effective use of the GPU’s resources and less processing pipelines sitting idle.