Introduction

It must relatively stress free working at Nvidia recently, they have been able to pretty much choose their own release schedules rather than feel any pressure from other companies to compete. In addition to this the Nvidia launches for the most part have been quite successful, take the 8800 GTX as an example. This card was released and throughout the technology press it received much praise for its raw speed and excellent design. The only possible downside was some niggling driver issues in Windows XP and the lack of a decent driver for Vista.

The product(s) that Nvidia and its partners are launching today is designed to bring DirectX 10 features to the mainstream market, in addition to this – this range introduce some quite astounding new video features which are not present on even the top end 8800 series. Top all this with an updated driver which features over 400 bug fixes since the 98 series driver and we have an interesting review ahead of us. So, furnished with overclocked edition GTS cards from MSI and BFG (with more coming this week from other makers) let’s see if the 8600 can deliver the goods.