With the intent of putting itself way out ahead of it's competitors, NVIDIA has come up with a brand new architecture which will entrench them in the hearts and minds of hardcore gamers and performance users worldwide. In just one generation, NVIDIA has introduced performance that, in many cases, doubles the competitions performance numbers on their top end product.

An Entirely New Design

NVIDIA has brought forth a completely new design for their video card offering. Instead of the normal process of simply increasing pixel and vertex shaders in order to improve quality or bumping up core clock and memory clock speeds to increase performance, the G80 relies on an entirely new unified architecture to do it's bidding. Created over the past 4 years, NVIDIA has been fairly quiet about the entire development cycle of the 8800 GPU and it's unified architecture model. Even as of July 2005, David Kirk (Chief Scientist at NVIDIA), was saying that they "will do a unified architecture in hardware when it makes sense." Well, it seems as though it definitely makes sense now!

The GeForce 8800GTX GPU consists of a massive array of 128 parallel Stream Processors (with a tidy 96 available on the 8800GTS), which are capable of performing the previously individualized tasks of vertex and pixel operations. Along with these tasks, the stream processors also handle geometry and even physics operations leaving room for NVIDIA to take a swipe at 3rd party physics add-on cards as well. Each of the stream processors can be dynamically allocated to whichever task makes the most sense for load balancing the GPU's resources for the current task at hand. In addition to the huge number of stream processors available, they also run on a separate clock than the GPU's core clock. The Shader clock runs at 1350MHz on the 8800GTX and a very respectable 1200MHz on the 8800GTS.

(Stream Processors shown as SP in the diagram below)

(near) Future Proof?

The NVIDIA 8800 Series is the first card to support Microsoft's DirectX 10 API and it's not hard to guess why. NVIDIA engineers designed the new product from the beginning with DirectX 10 and Windows Vista in mind. Also good to note is that the GeForce 8800GTX was the reference GPU for DirectX 10 API development and certification. DirectX was introduced back in 1995 to be launched in conjunction with the Windows 95 operating system. DirectX 10 represents the most significant enhancement of the technology since the introduction of Pixel Shading in DirectX 8.0. Shader Model 4.0 has been released as a part of the DirectX 10 specification and the 8800 Series is fully compliant with all of it's requirements.

In a nutshell, the big differences between Shader Model 3.0 and 4.0 boil down to three main changes; unification of shaders, geometry shaders, and resource virtualization. With the incoming Microsoft Windows Vista operating system, and it's exclusive use of DirectX 10, this card is primed and ready to fully support both gaming and and kind of creative production work in the foreseeable future.

Specifications

Features

• NVIDIA G80 Architecture
  • Full Direct3D 10 Support
  • DirectX10 Shader Model 4.0 Support
    • Vertex Shader 4.0
    • Geometry Shader 4.0
    • Pixel Shader 4.0
    • Internal 128-bit Floating Point (FP32) Precision
  • Unlimited Shader Lengths
  • Up to 128 textures per pass
  • Support for FP32 texture formats with filtering
  • Non-Power of two texture support
  • 8 multiple Render Targets
• NVIDIA Lumenex Technology
  • Full FP32 floating point support throughout the entire pipeline
  • FP32 floating point frame buffer support
  • Up to 8x, gamma adjusted, native multisampling FSAA with jittered or rotated grids
  • Up to 16x, coverage sample antialiasing
  • Transparent multisampling and supersampling
  • Lossless color, texture, Z and stencil data compression
  • Fast Z clear
  • Up to 16x anisotropic filtering
• NVIDIA SLI Support
• NVIDIA Pure Video HD Technology
  • Adaptable programmable video processor with GPU shader core assist and post processing
  • High Definition video decode acceleration (H.264, VC-1, WMV-HD, MPEG2-HD)
  • Spatial temporal de-interlacing
  • Inverse 2:2 and 3:2 pull-down (inverse telecine)

GF8800 Offerings from ASI

ASI is fortunate to have a very healthy relationship with many of the top video card vendors, thus assuring that we have a good selection of the latest products available for our customers. In the 8800 arena, we have cards available from ASUS, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI and XFX. You'd be hard pressed to find that kind of selection on any retail shelf in America.

SKU	Brand	Card Name	Model	GPU Clock	Memory Clock	RAM Amount
54847		EN8800GTX/HTDP/768M	8800GTX	575MHz	900MHz	768MB
55125		EN8800GTS/HTDP/640M	8800GTS	500MHz	800MHz	640MB
55117		N821	8800GTS	500MHz	800MHz	640MB
55174		GV-NX88X768H-RH	8800GTX	575MHz	900MHz	768MB
55175		GV-NX88S640H-RH	8800GTS	500MHz	800MHz	640MB
55040		NX8800GTX-T2D768E	8800GTX	575MHz	900MHz	768MB
55041		NX8800GTS-T2D640E	8800GTS	500MHz	800MHz	640MB
55042		8800GTX	8800GTX	575MHz	900MHz	768MB
55051		8800GTS	8800GTS	500MHz	800MHz	640MB

System and Power Requirements

The GeForce 8800 series cards are both sizable beasts. As is the norm these days, these cards will eat up two slot worth of space on your I/O shield. With the power and complexity of cards today, we don't see this trend going away any time soon. 

For the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 series, the power requirements to run in single card mode aren't all that much different then running any other high end card. NVIDIA recommends a 450W power supply for GTX-based cards or a 400W power supply for GTS-based cards. For the 8800GTX card you'll require 2 available PCI-E power connectors, the 8800GTS only requires 1. If you're a hearty soul who likes to live life to the fullest and can afford to super-size it by running dual 8800 cards, you're going to need to find a power supply in the 850-1000 watt range. This is roughly the equivalent of running an extra refrigerator in your house.

Conclusion

NVIDIA seems to have pulled out all the stops with it's latest offering. The GeForce 8800GTX and 8800GTS cards offer more than an adequate beat-down to any other card available today. To be fair, the competition has a new product in the pipeline and should be releasing it within the next few months, but for right now it seems as though NVIDIA has a firm hold on the video card market lead.