Digital Trends

It's only been about a month since Nvidia rolled out the GeForce 8800 GT, but now the company is upping the ante for gamers with the 512 MB GeForce 8800 GTS video card.

Gamers probably don't want much more for the holidays than the ability to frag more enemies, dominate more arenas, win more races—and look really good while they're doing it. To that end, graphics developer Nvidia has tolled out the GeForce 8800 GTS video controller with 512 MB of onboard video memory…and the new cards are available at retailers today.

"If you want the best experience on the PC games coming out right now, then buying a new GPU should be top on your list of upgrades," said Nvidia's GeForce general manager Ujesh Desai, in a statement. "GeForce 8800 GTS 512 is a fantastic option that we are providing gamers in time for the holiday season."

The new card follows hot on the heels of the GeForce 8800 GT, which hit the streets just over a month ago. Nvidia says the new GeForce 8800 GTS offers 25 percent more processing power than previous Nvidia cards at the same price point (128 stream processors, compared to 96 stream processors in the GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB), and also sports PCI Express 2.0, dual-link HDCP, and Nvidia's second-generation PureVideo HD engine to offer quality playback from Blu-ray or HD DVD content by offloading all H.264 decoding to the graphics card. The 8800 GTS also supports SLI so extreme gamers can hook up two graphics cards to drive their displays.

The GeForce 880 GTS 512 MB should carry a retail price from $299 to $349.