For a while there, trying to find a decent DirectX 10-capable graphics card for somewhere around two hundred bucks was a tough assignment. Nvidia had its GeForce 8600 GTS, but that card didn't really perform well enough to measure up similarly priced DX9 cards. On the Radeon side of things, AMD had, well, pretty much nothing. You could buy a cheap, slow DX10-ready Radeon or a faster one with a formidable price tag. Between them, crickets chirped as tumbleweeds blew by.

Happily, the GPU makers saw fit to remedy this situation, and in the past few months, we've gained an embarrassment of riches in video card choices between about $170 and $250, including the screaming GeForce 8800 GT and a pair of solid values in the Radeon HD 3850 and 3870. Now, that embarrassment is becoming positively scandalous, as Nvidia unveils yet another new GPU aimed at graphics cards below the $200 mark: the GeForce 9600 GT. Welcome the new middle management
Let's get this out of the way at the outset. Nvidia's decision to make this new graphics card the first in the GeForce 9 series is all kinds of baffling. They just spent the past few months introducing two new members of the 8-series, the GeForce 8800 GT and the confusingly named GeForce 8800 GTS 512, based on a brand-new chip codenamed G92. The G92 packs a number of enhancements over older GeForce 8 graphics processors, including some 3D performance tweaks and improved HD video features. Now we have another new GPU, codenamed G94, that's based on the same exact generation of technology and is fundamentally similar to the G92 in almost every way. The main difference between the two chips is that Nvidia has given the G94 half the number of stream processor (SP) units in the G92 in order to create a smaller, cheaper chip. Beyond that, they're pretty much the same thing.