Although it's becoming increasingly hard to buy, we thought it was important to include a 320MB 8800 GTS in this month's Labs test of mid-range graphics cards. Throughout 2007, this was the card that everybody was talking about and aspired to owning, as it delivered far greater performance for its reasonable (less than £200) price than any other GPU.
The reason for the 320MB 8800 GTS's great success is its use of exactly the same GPU as the high-end 640MB 8800 GTS. As such, it has 96 stream processors clocked at a heady 1.2GHz - a very impressive specification considering its price. As its name makes patently clear, the only difference between the two original 8800 GTS models is the size of the frame buffer - the 320MB version having 320MB of GDDR3 clocked at 800MHz (1.6GHz effective). As the oldest GPU in this Labs test, the 320MB 8800 GTS is a PCI-E 1.1 card, and doesn't support Shader Model 4.1 or DirectX 10.1.
The 320MB 8800 GTS was capable of playing Call of Duty 4 smoothly at 1,280 x 1,024 with 2x AA, and Need for Speed: Pro Street at 1,680 x 1,050 with 2x AA, which shows how far ahead of its time this GPU was. This is a pretty amazing achievement for an older GPU, although Crysis at high detail proved to be too much for the 320MB 8800 GTS. However, with a minimum frame rate of 19fps, you should be able to make Crysis run smoothly by overclocking the GPU and RAM.
Although the 320MB 8800 GTS's successors, the 256MB and 512MB versions of the 8800 GT, are clearly far superior, it's encouraging to see that last year's best value GPU is able to keep its head above water in most modern games. As such, it makes little sense to upgrade to an 8800 GT or 512MB 8800 GTS, so we'd advise holding off buying a new graphics card until Nvidia releases its new high-end GPUs later this year.
Author: James Gorbold
Nvidia GeForce 320MB 8800 GTS