Gone are the days when great gaming meant big gaping holes in your pocket in order to purchase graphics cards, not to mention the tedious installation process that follows. Now anyone can play great games and experience state of the art High Definition (HD) videos and pictures and the whole host of what a video card offers these days at a mere $***-$***.That is exactly what is on offer with one of NVIDIA’s recent cards, the formidable 9500 GT.

For those of you who have no clue what a graphic card is all about and what it is capable of, I shall give a brief introduction. Graphics cards are actually graphics processing units, commonly known as GPU’s.They are highly specialized processors that offload 3D graphics rendering from the microprocessor. To most people graphics cards are synonymous with video games or animation softwares. But the truth is that the GPUs of today can be used for much more than playing games. Video features such as Blu-ray and DVD playback are slowly growing older; Technology has made it possible for the GPUs of today to compete with even high end video devices such as dedicated Blu-ray players and the like.

The Nvidia 9500 GT offers much more that just discrete graphics which nowadays is just not enough for any enthusiastic gamers (such as myself).People find it extremely annoying to play games at very low settings and bad frame rates or as Nvidia puts it, people want to play games “the way its meant to be played”. But as mentioned earlier,not everyone can afford a $400-$500 graphics card and in fact the cards that sell most are the entry level ones, most of which admittedly are not very great as they allow people to play the latest games but not with that satisfaction of playing with the ‘reasonable’ visual settings which is perfect for light or nonhardcore gamers but not enough for the little more enthusiastic sort.

So this is exactly the problem that Nvidia seems to have addressed with its 9500 GT which can actually be said to have replaced the 8600 GT in the NVIDIA’s lineup of GPUs.Now it must also be mentioned that the 8600 GT was a very satisfactory card in itself. The G84 chip powering NVIDIA’s GeForce 8600 series was built on TSMC’s larger 80-nm manufacturing process and contained 289 million transistors and in comparison, the 9500 GT is built on the G96 chip which sports 32 stream processors  and is built on TSMC’s 65-nm and 55-nm manufacturing process, the chip contains about 314 million transistors. Now fixing up and installing this card is a real piece of cake so you don’t have to worry about calling your computer technician, just do it yourself (like me!) and for the software and the drivers its all pretty much straight forward but if you still have any  trouble, then refer to the manual which has the step by step instructions.

Now it is advisable to have around 2 gigs of RAM and a decent processor to go with this card because although this is a very good card, it is not (technically) high-end so just give it plenty of support and it should do just fine. Coming over to the actual product features, there’s the directX 10 support (with 1 GB of graphics memory of course), which so characterizes the 9 series and then there’s the NVIDIA SLI technology allows you to connect more than one graphics card to your system for improved performance, the NVIDIA Forceware which provides enhanced performance and speed, stunning visual quality and unified driver architecture (UDA) to ensure forward and backward compatibility with hardware and software. And finally Shader Model 4.0 support ensures compatibility with current and future gaming titles so you won’t have to worry about future games not working! So what are you waiting for? Time for some budget gaming!

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