Welcoming The GeForce 8500/8600 Series

This morning NVIDIA introduced the GeForce 8500 and 8600 series graphics cards. These cards are the budget DirectX 10 components to the higher-end GeForce 8800 GTX / GTS. The NVIDIA GeForce 8600GTS is coming in at about the $200~229 USD price point while the 8600GT will be selling in the $150 range and the low-end 8500GT coming in at $89. These new cards support PureVideo HD technology, Scalable Link Interface (SLI) on the 8600 series, Shader Model 4.0, and much more. All of these products should be on sale at your favorite online retailers starting May 1. Phoronix will be covering the NVIDIA GeForce 8500 / 8600 series shortly under GNU/Linux and Solaris. There is no new NVIDIA Linux driver out today, but you can expect a new release shortly. The press release for these new graphics cards is available from NVIDIA Corporation.