NVIDIA announced that the GeForce 8800GT is hitting store shelves today. The card was apparently specifically developed to answer demand for high-performing graphics at the €199 to €259 (~$285-$375) price point.

Here’s Cevat Yerli, CEO of Crytek, pimping the 8800GT as the perfect card for Crysis: “GeForce 8800 GT is the perfect card for gamers that want to play Crysis. By bringing such high performance to the sub-€250 price segment, NVIDIA is allowing even more gamers to experience the full range of Crysis’s stunning visual effects at maxed-out resolutions.”

Ujesh Desai, general manager of GeForce desktop GPUs at NVIDIA: “When we introduced the GeForce 8 Series family, our most savvy customers and press demanded a product with 64 stream processors and a 256-bit memory interface to deliver more performance at the popular €199 to €259 price point. Today we decided to raise the bar and deliver GeForce 8800 GT with 112 stream processors, a fast 256-bit memory interface, and our second-generation PureVideo HD technology, giving our customers an incredible value proposition. At this price point, gamers are getting more performance and features than ever before.”

From the press release: “In addition to 112 stream processors—each individually clocked at 1. 5GHz—and a 256-bit memory interface running at a blazing-fast 900MHz, the GeForce 8800 GT is designed for the new PCI Express 2.0 bus standard and is backwards compatible with the original PCI Express standard.”

The GeForce 8800 GT also marries the best-in-gaming with the best-in-HD. It leverages NVIDIA’s revolutionary second-generation video processing engine to deliver high-quality playback of HD DVD and Blu-ray movies on everyday PCs. The new programmable video processing engine takes on all of the high definition H.264 video decoding, freeing the CPU to perform other tasks and significantly reducing power consumption, heat, and noise.”