With its GeForce 8800 Ultra perched on top of the PC graphics performance pile, Nvidia Corp. has turned its attention to mainstream gamers eager for DirectX 10 titles such as Hellgate: London and Crysis, but whose graphics-card budget stops at $200 to $250 -- and at one instead of two motherboard slots.

The GeForce 8800 GT is a graphics processing unit (GPU) that uses 512MB instead of 768MB of RAM with a 256- instead of 384-bit memory interface, but whose core and memory speeds come close to the flagship 8800 Ultra's -- and whose 1.5GHz shader speeds match that GPU's, with an ample 112 shaders or stream processors on board. Designed for the new PCI Express 2.0 bus standard, the GT also uses Nvidia's second-generation video processing engine for high-quality playback of HD DVD and Blu-ray movies, freeing the system CPU from the job of H.264 video decoding. Graphics-card manufacturers rolling out GeForce 8800 GT products today include Albatron, Biostar, ECS, Sparkle, and MSI.