NVIDIA has now officially announced the 9600 GT video card calling it one of the largest generational performance leaps in company history. The 9600 GT is the first GPU in the 9 series and NVIDIA says the GPU delivers 116% more performance than its predecessor.

“After going to all the GeForce LANs and seeing the rigs that gamers play on, we wanted to kick off the GeForce 9 with the perfect GPU for gamers," said Ujesh Desai, general manager of GeForce desktop GPUs at NVIDIA. "The first product to be introduced in the GeForce 9 family gives gamers the horsepower to play cutting-edge DirectX 10 games at a price they will love and can afford."

“NVIDIA continues to innovate in hardware technology so that game enthusiasts and consumers can fully experience the incredible graphics offerings in Microsoft's operating systems, including Windows Vista," said Kevin Unangst, senior global director of Games for Windows, Microsoft. "The new GeForce 9600 GT GPU further extends NVIDIA's ability to deliver improved DirectX 10 performance on Windows Vista at an affordable price point, so that anyone and everyone can have an amazing gaming experience."

The 9600 GT has a 1625MHz shader clock and a 256-bit memory interface running at 900 MHz. The card also offloads all of the H.264 video decoding from the CPU.

Via NVIDIA