9600GT :/

The power requirements are lower and the performance is nearly an 8800.

an 8800GT which is not GTX or Ultra :).

Sure, but a GTX is also 5x more expensive and goes to waste on current games. An 8800GT is $250 and this 9600 was $199.

They have said that the 9800 will only be 30% more powerful than the 8800, though I'm not sure if that is the GT or the GTX. If it's the GT, the 8800 GTX will still stay on top, at least until a 9800 GTX is released.

Well I wouldn't call it a waste of power :), depends on what games you play tho. If you play Quake 3, anything above the GeForce 3 series or even 2 might be considered waste.

As for the price, I would probably have made the same decision as you if the 8800GT is $50 more as the 9600GT.

The 8800 GTX is... what... like 2x+ more powerful than a GT? An 8800 GT can run Crysis, at maximum settings, quite smooth. I'm sure games are coming that will need that kind of power, but they're still a ways off.

I've not tried Crysis since the release, don't know if they fixed the performance with patches. But here Q6700, 4GB DDR2 Corsair Dominator, 8800Ultra .. Crysis ran like shit on maximum settings at 1600x1200 and a little less shit at 1280x1024.

Might have something to do with Vista x64, but still I doubt it would run much much better on XP. Thus I don't really believe that a 8800GT can run Crysis quite smooth on maximum settings, but it's not even important, Crysis is a system hog anwyay, you'll do just fine with your 9600GT :).

Hmm.. I haven't tried going up to higher resolutions yet - I'm a big fan of 1024x768 and the game is running flawlessly with max settings. I'm on Vista 32bit, so maybe the 64 bit is even worse off.

Strange enough, Crysis autodetected my settings to all medium, so when I set them all to very high, I was quite pleased to have it run just as smooth as on medium.

maybe driver settings are overriding your game settings