8800GT VS 9600GT
If you are thinking on buying a new mid-range or budget graphics card with a good value for performance you should have a look at the Nvidia cards. The 9600GT and the 8800GT are the best performers with real value.
The 9600GT is a newer card but just because belong to the GeForce 9 series doesn’t mean that is better than the 8800GT. Both cards are great for gaming and if you are building a gaming PC with a budget you can’t go wrong with any of these cards but there is some specification differences between them.
The 8800GT has 112 stream processors and the 9600GT has only 64 and that is almost half of the 8800GT. Though the 9600GT is almost 10% faster on the core clock 650MHz vs 600MHz and shader clock 1625Mhz vs 1500Mhz with the same memory clock 900MHz, memory amount of 512MB, memory interface of 256-bit, memory bandwidth 57.6 and the texture fill rate is only 20.8 vs 33.6 of the 8800GT. 
As you can see on the texture fill rate the bigger quantity of stream processors on the 8800GT makes a big difference. This difference on stream processors can be seen on some games running at high video settings and high resolutions. Like playing over the 1280×1024 the 8800GT will outperform the 9600GT though is a bit faster on the shader and core clocks. Have a look at the tests on the 9600GT HERE
The 9600GT is a great card if you are not playing games at resolutions over 1280×1024, at this resolution is a great card able to run any game smoothly and giving you good frame per seconds. The price difference between them is very small around R2200 for the 9600GT and R2500 for the 8800GT so for just R300 more you can get those extra frame per second at higher resolutions. So I can say that the 8800GT is the best value for performance graphic card out there right now but not by too much the 9600GT is very good as well.
Check the following videos to make a better decision: 9600GT
And the 8800GT
You can buy the 9600GT right HERE
You can buy the 8800GT right HERE
