Refreshing The World's First DX10 GPU

On November 9th, 2006, NVIDIA launched the G80 GPU. Not only does this new GPU boast an entirely new massively-parallel unified architecture, it also marks the beginning of a new era in 3D graphics - DirectX 10. The G80 had 681 million transistors and was fabricated using TSMC's 90nm process technology.

Almost a year later, NVIDIA is finally launching a refresh of the G80 GPU - the NVIDIA G92 GPU. It is also known as the D8P, short for Desktop 8 Performance. Although the basic architecture remains unchanged from the G80, the G92 comes with a new video processor and an improved transparency AA algorithm. This is why the G92 has 73 million more transistors than the G80 even though it actually has fewer shader processors.

Fortunately, the G92 is fabricated using the TSMC 65nm process technology. This allows NVIDIA to deliver a smaller, cooler chip even with the increased transistor count. The end result is a single-slot graphics card with a maximum power consumption of 105 W - the new NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT.

Armed with the G92 GPU, the new NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT graphics card has 112 stream processors and a 256-bit memory interface, allowing it to achieve a fill rate of 33.6 GigaTexels per second and a memory bandwidth of 57.6 GB/s. All in a slim, single-slot graphics card.

The NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT will incidentally be the world's first graphics card to support PCI Express 2.0. That means it is capable of supporting up to 32 PCI Express lanes, essentially doubling the PCI Express bandwidth to 16 GB/s when installed in a compatible motherboard.

Like the GeForce 8800 GTS, the new NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT will come with two different memory configurations. The standard model will have 512 MB of GDDR3 memory and priced around $199-249. There will also be a model with 256 MB of GDDR3 memory and priced slightly lower at around $179-199.

The two new GeForce 8800 GT models will fill in the large mid-range gap in the GeForce 8 series. The table on the right will be NVIDIA's new GeForce 8 product line-up.

Unfortunately, the launch of the new GeForce 8800 GT will not change NVIDIA's pricing of their graphics cards. In fact, even the price range of the year-old GeForce 8800 GTX and GeForce 8800 GTS will remain unchanged at those nose-bleeding heights. For those who want reasonably-good DirectX 10 performance on a budget, the new GeForce 8800 GT may offer the best bang for the buck.

Specifications

Let's take a look at how the new NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT squares up against its elder G80-based brothers.

Although the specifications will give you an idea about its performance, the new GeForce 8800 GT sports additional features thanks to the improvements in the G92 GPU. Let's take a look at what's new...