So, what're your thoughts after seeing it in action in some form or fashion? NVIDIA has showcase at http://www.nvidia.com/page/geforce8.html , though I'm wondering why they haven't released any tech demos for at least the basic stuff you can do (or at least for those with Windows Vista RC1/2).

The thing that trips me out the most is the water effect (the DX10 geometry shader). The Quantum Effects technology I'd have to see in another form or fashion.

But geez, the 8800 kind of creates a whole new ball park of terms we have to know. Instead of pipelines, they use stream processors (or SPU). But from what I read, it's supposed to allow for 100% utilization of the GPU. So one could say it's an alternative to unified shaders. SPUs are different than the unified shader technology.

But of course, some people are going to complain that it doesn't use GDDR4 while the R580+ does, it doesn't go along with the usual powers of two for RAM, and it's got a weird data-length transfer rate. Maybe by the time I finally get enough money for an upgrade to one of these babies, it'll be at 8900, where it finally has 1024MB of RAM and is using 512-bit transfer rates.

Anyway, can't wait to see this in its fullest.

I can honestly say it's difficult to forsee how much of an impact these new Direct3d generation will have on games, as at the moment the majority of games are still being released under d3d9 by a long shot. I've heard a rumour that this card only reserves a small portion of the dye for d3d10 instructions, so basically, in a sense, this card is in the middle of a technological evolution, and it is handicapped because of it.

However, the performance with this thing in d3d9 games is amazing, it kills anything that is thrown at it.... If someone gave me one for free I definetly wouldn't be mad, though I definetly would pay that much myself for this.

The stream processors is a unique approach, and in all honesty I really don't know if this will be more powerful than the unified shader approach, we will see : ).

I have to admit, the odd ram size and bit transfer rate is a little strange, definetly makes for an unusual card. Almost feels like a hiccup on Nvidia's side of things. It's absolutely amazing to see these kind of graphics finally rendered in real time, finally we can have truly cinematic gaming experiences.

My only complaint is the pricepoint and power consumption, and I myself am in a similar situation. I'm waiting for the radeon x2800 to come to compete, and then eventually I will be buying the 8900 or the x2900 refresher cards from nvidia and ati respectively.

Oh, and this is my first post. ^^, nice to be here. Hopefully i'll enjoy my stay, so long as there is enough technology geeks in here to post news on forthcoming developments.