Currently, the Geforce 8800 GTX and GTS mark the high end of the 3D accelerator spectrum, with ATI's response waiting in the wings. In the meantime, NVIDIA is following up its successes with the new mid-range Geforce 8 chip. Naturally, the Geforce 8600 GTS will be measured against it bigger siblings. Here's what it brings to the table: high clock speeds, DirectX 10 support and an 80 nm production process. We've already taken a look at offerings from EVGA and Sparkle. Now we're going to take a look at Foxconn's GeForce 8600 GTS. Of course, one shouldn't expect a mid-range card to pack the same processing punch as the 8800 versions. Still, the overall performance of the smaller Geforce 8 chip is still sufficient to replace its predecessors, the 7600 GT through 7900 GS. "Replace" may actually not be the right word here, though. Thanks to its newer architecture, which combines the vertex and the pixel shaders as unified shaders, it can eliminate certain performance deficits of the Geforce 7 cards. The game Oblivion is a prime example, as it runs much more smoothly on the Geforce 8600 GTS with pixel shader 3 based HDR enabled than on the previous generation. Depending on the screen resolution and which card it is compared to, it offers between 18% and 143% better frame rates. Of course, the Geforce 8600 GTS can't keep up with the speed optimizations of a Radeon X1900 XT. Its DirectX 10 capability is the Nvidia chip's only advantage over its Canadian rival.