Blog do Ceschiatti (6qat)

But you do have to keep in mind, that the most powerful card may not be any faster than the weaker card in some situations. If you are playing CSS at 1280×1024 the 9600GT will not be any slower than the 8800Ultra or 8800GTS 512 because such a low resolution is not even putting such a powerful card to much use. And its an irrelevant argument to say the 8800ultra scoring 192 fps is a better investment than the 9600gt scoring 110 because the game (like most other games) is capped at 99fps and anything rendered beyond that is not used. And one could further argue whether or not its even worth it to note fps difference as the “butter zone” is between 30-60fps.

So for most gamers the 9600GT is the perfect balance of price and performance, if you play above 1680×1050 then the 8800GT/GTS 512 is the better choice, if you play beyond that and require a dual/triple SLI set up for your 2560×1600 display, then the older 8800GTX/Ultra would be higher in performance, notably because of the added memory (768mb vs 512mb, SLI does not add memory, each card retains its independent frame buffer) and the increase memory bandwidth (8800GTX has 86.5gb vs 62gb on 8800GTS 512)

So newer is not always better. And yes, Nvidia has flooded the market and caused so much confusion that most people just buy the 8800GT and be done with it because the performance difference between cards can be so minimal that its not worth the extra $80. And take the new 9800GTX for example, in essence its just an 8800GTS 512mb overclocked from 650/1625/1940 to 675/1688/2200 (reference clocks set by nvidia) so if you were to overclock that 8800GTS to match the clock speeds of the 9800GTX, there would be no performance difference really…

http://www.devhardware.com/forums/nvidia-video-card-6/9600-vs-8800t-184215.html