Nvidia 8800GTX Revealed
Sledgehammer70
California Icrontian
Nvidia has been very quiet about its next generation DirectX 10 chip over the last few months, but as the release date is drawing closer news is flooding the web of how great these cards are performing.
Nvidia has built its 8800 series on a 90nm process which sports a massive 681 million transistors and is manufactured at TSMC. The 8 series GTX model has a core clock of 575MHz while its little brother the GTS runs at 500MHz. To match the Core speed of the GTX Nvidia has slammed some GDDR 3 which works at a 384-bit mode with 12 chips totaling 768MB of memory clocked at 1800MHz pushing a total bandwidth of 86.4GB per sec. & a fill rate of 36.8 Billion pixels per sec. The 8800GTX is also the largest card built to date just at 28 centimeters in length.
Along with the 8800 being the first GPU to support DirectX 10 it is also the first to support the 'unified' architecture. Nvidia is touting that the 8800 is completely unified, which means the same pipeline calculates vertex, pixel and the geometry Shader in one go around. Nvidia's unified parallel Shader design has 128 individual stream processors running at 1.35GHz. Each processor is capable of being dynamically allocated to vertex, pixel, geometry or physics operation. We don’t have any idea where this 1.35GHz number comes from but the card renders fast that's all you should care about now. And of course if supports DirectX 10, an exclusivity for Vista only.
The biggest feature everyone is excited about is that Nvidia finally has a card that supports FSAA and HDR at the same time. The Oblivion Die-hards have a new graphics card to upgrade to. It supports the new 128-bit HDR. This one handles 32 bits per component and produces better quality. The Geforce 8800 GTX handles 24 ROPs (Raster Operation Units) or, should we say, can render 24 pixels per clock.
Two power six-pin connectors means that the card gets 2x75W from the cables plus an additional 75W from the PCIe bus. This brings total power consumption to an earth-heating 225W.
Source: The Inquirer
Nvidia has built its 8800 series on a 90nm process which sports a massive 681 million transistors and is manufactured at TSMC. The 8 series GTX model has a core clock of 575MHz while its little brother the GTS runs at 500MHz. To match the Core speed of the GTX Nvidia has slammed some GDDR 3 which works at a 384-bit mode with 12 chips totaling 768MB of memory clocked at 1800MHz pushing a total bandwidth of 86.4GB per sec. & a fill rate of 36.8 Billion pixels per sec. The 8800GTX is also the largest card built to date just at 28 centimeters in length.
Along with the 8800 being the first GPU to support DirectX 10 it is also the first to support the 'unified' architecture. Nvidia is touting that the 8800 is completely unified, which means the same pipeline calculates vertex, pixel and the geometry Shader in one go around. Nvidia's unified parallel Shader design has 128 individual stream processors running at 1.35GHz. Each processor is capable of being dynamically allocated to vertex, pixel, geometry or physics operation. We don’t have any idea where this 1.35GHz number comes from but the card renders fast that's all you should care about now. And of course if supports DirectX 10, an exclusivity for Vista only.
The biggest feature everyone is excited about is that Nvidia finally has a card that supports FSAA and HDR at the same time. The Oblivion Die-hards have a new graphics card to upgrade to. It supports the new 128-bit HDR. This one handles 32 bits per component and produces better quality. The Geforce 8800 GTX handles 24 ROPs (Raster Operation Units) or, should we say, can render 24 pixels per clock.
Two power six-pin connectors means that the card gets 2x75W from the cables plus an additional 75W from the PCIe bus. This brings total power consumption to an earth-heating 225W.
These cards perform better than anything I have ever seen, If your a "Graphics Guy" you will want a pair of these cards pushing your pixels.The first one to arrive in our hands was an EVGA Geforce 8800 GTX with a brand-new ACS3 Cooler. EVGA dared to change the Nvidia holy cooler and made some modifications to it. It added a huge metal heat spreader on the back of the card and it covered Nvidia heatpipe cooler with a massive EVGA branded piece of squared metal. It is as long as the card itself but you won’t have any troubles to connect the power cords - the cards have two of them or the two SLI connectors.
Nvidia decided to put two SLI connectors on the top of the card and G80 works with the existing cables that you get with your motherboard. The only trouble is that Nvidia doesn’t bundle an additional SLI cable so, if you have a single motherboard, you will end up with a single cable. As we had two in the lab we just borrowed one SLI cable from the other board. The card takes two slots and you need a bigger SLI connecting cable to put them together. We tried it and it works in SLI too.
The ACS3 cooler is actually more efficient that Nvidia's reference cooler as the card works at 55C in 2D mode while the Nvidia reference cooler cools the card to 60 Celsius only. This is what makes the difference between EVGA card and the rest of the cards based on the reference cooler design.
Source: The Inquirer
0
Comments
I wish I could let myself get one of these.
You have to look at it from a Pimps perspective, you don't want just one turning your tricks for you so you get 2 to increase your performance.