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NVIDIA cards support DirectX 10.0 Shader Model 4.0. While the competition in the form of AMD and S3 have moved to SM 4.1 which adds some support for Global Illumination and better anti-aliasing, the vast majority of cards and games on the market today are SM 4.0. In any event, 4.1 is a minor update which shouldn't affect anyone in the lifetime of the card as developers are still using DX10 as the base, due to the installed base and feature set.  Two SLI Bridges NVIDIA first introduced SLI to their motherboards and video cards with the 6800 Ultra launch in 2004. The concept of two video cards working together to improve gaming performance has a long history including the 3DFX Voodoo 2 SLI, the Rage Fury Maxx and the newly released 9800GX2. The 9800GTX has the ability to do Tri-SLI which allows the user to use up to 3 video cards at the same time. XFX has clocked their Stream Processors at the default clock of 1688MHz. NVIDIA has separated the Core Clock from their Shader Clock frequencies which meant that every NVIDIA card since the 8800GTX was launched and this card is no exception. Higher frequencies mean higher performance across the board as higher amounts of triangles and pixels are drawn. The Core clock frequency on the 9800GTX from XFX is 675MHz which is a small increase from the Core Clock of the 8800GTS 512MB of 650MHz. In fact, if you look at the various NVIDIA video cards in their lineup, their 9800GTX is only a small step faster in frequency across the board except in the area of memory where the 2.2GHz frequency is a 200MHz increase over the other cards default clock rates. Here's a chart representing the information on NVIDIA's single GPU cards on the market today. Note that the 9800GTX has the same specifications as the 8800GTS 512MB with minor clock speed differences, in fact the 9800GTX has the same specifications in terms of features etc as the 9800GX2, 8800GT 512MB (with the exception of 128 SPs instead of the 112 on the 8800GT 512MB) and some compression technology which NVIDIA has not given detailed information on for G9x series and above.
The G92 (8800GT 512MB) introduced new features to NVIDIA's PureVideo CODEC. The new features include the ability to run two HD sources at the same time (playing the movie on one screen, and the director's commentary on the other screen for example), improved color and saturation correction. The 9800GTX also has this engine, allowing the next generation of High Definition content to be viewed with this card including Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. Contents: 
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