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The first thing in the “improved” list is the manufacturing process, which has been reduced down from 80 to 65 nm. This implies that the power consumption will not be as high (the cards we tested need no more than just over 100 W) and that the card will only require a single 6-pin power connector. The G92 comprises over 754 million transistors, which is undoubtedly impressive, but it must be noted that the die-size of this chip is huge.
Nvidia claims that this card should take up the market slot found between the 8800GTS models with 320 and 640 MB. We shall see if the card complies. The G92 possesses 112 stream processors, divised in seven blocks, which is 16 SPs better than the 8800GTS. The ROP number is lower by four, however, Nvidia claims that they are now better optimized by far, and should present no overall performance impact even at resolutions as high as 2560x1600. The ROPs have 128-bit floating point HDR and 16xAA support.
| Specs | GeForce 8800GT | GeForce 8800GTS 320MB | GeForce 8600GTS | | | | | | | GPU | G92 | G80 | G84 | | Inteface | PCI Express 2.0 | PCI Express | PCI Express | | Core Clock (MHz) | 600 | 500 | 675 | | Shader Clock(MHz) | 1500 | 1200 | 1450 | | Stream Processors | 112 | 96 | 32 | | Process (nm) | 65 | 90 | 65 | | Texture Units | 56 | 24 | 16 | | Raster Operators | 16 | 20 | 8 | | Shader Operations (Operations/sec) | 168000 | 115200 | 46400 | | Texture Fillrate (MPix/sec) | 33600 | 12000 | 10800 | | Pixel Fillrate (MPix/sec) | 9600 | 10000 | 5400 | | Memory Size (MB) | 512 | 320 | 256 | | Memory Frequency (MHz) | 1800 | 1600 | 2000 | | Memory Bandwidth (GB/s) | 57,6 | 64 | 32 | | Memory bus (bit) | 256 | 320 | 128 | | Memory | GDDR3 | GDDR3 | GDDR3 |
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Also, the number of texture units has gone up by eight, which is logical, as there are eight per SP block, which means that the total number of texture units is now 56. This results in an enormous texture fillrate, which is something that a great number of games relies upon, so in cases such as these, good performance is guaranteed. The shader section has always been the weak point of Nvidia products, which is the case now as well, which makes ATI a better choice for shader-heavy games such as Oblivion etc.
The clock values have gone up as well, so the default clocks are 600 MHz for the core, which is an almost 100 MHz improvement, and 1700 MHz for the stream processors. The interesting thing about the new series is that the bus width is only 256 bits wide – obviously, both major manufacturers came to the conclusion that a bus wider than this is irrational for this class of products. We agree with this point of view, as the resolutions are unlikely to go any higher than 1600x1200 in mid-range configurations. The last variable – memory clocks. They are set to 1800 MHz on 1ns GDDR3 memory chips. Unlike the weaker GTS, which has 320 MB of VRAM, 8800GT has the optimal quantity of 512 MB of VRAM.
The latest offering of Nvidia is also the first card we received that supports the PCI-E 2.0 standard (the card arrived just a few days before the Radeon HD 3850). PCI Express 2.0 increases the motherboard-to-graphics card bandwidth to 8 Gbps/lane, which totals at 16 Gbps. Naturally, the card will never require such a large amount of bandwidth, but PCI-E 2.0 has yet another advantage. The native PCI-E 2.0 slot can provide the card with up to 150 W of power, which means that if you plug the card in a PCI-E 2.0 compatible motherboard, no external connector is required to supply the card with power – 150 W is more than the card will ever need. The next advancement in line is the cooling system.
By looking at the specs alone, one would probably deduce that the cooling is very similar, if not exactly the same. However, this card is very thin, elegant and pretty much quiet all the time. It doesn't take up more than one slot. Although the system itself isn't lacking in quality, we would prefer a better solution for the fan, one that would be even more quiet and efficient. The cooling body was made out of aluminium, while copper is present only in the heatpipe system, which transfer the heat equally over the entire body.
Nvidia has an interesting policy when the PureVideo is in question, which comprises the VP1/VP2 engine. Video Processor 1 is present in GeForce 8800GTS, GTX and Ultra models, simply because these accelerators are generally paired with only the best CPUs, so any form of advanced “de-burdening” of the CPU is not really necessary, as those CPUs are more than capable of decoding HD video. Therefore, Video Processor 2 is reserved only for the weaker models such as 8600 and 8400 series, as the CPUs which are teamed up with 'em are more likely to be not particularly fast nor efficient. However, for reasons beyond our capabilities of speculation, 8800GT also sports the VP2 variant of the processing chip, along with the Bit-Stream Processor and AES 128-bit decryption. This practically means that the HD video is entirely decoded in the card, placing a minimal load on the CPU.
Although there is a rumour in circulation that there is a major lack of G92 chips in production, and thus on the market, as well as the fact that Nvidia stock value has gone down significantly since the release of 8800GT, we received a total of three 8800GTs signed by different manufacturers: ASUS, XFX and MSI. All three cards were obviously manufactured in the same factory, which makes them nearly identical. Nearly. First of all, some of them came to us pre-overclocked, just enough to give their competitor a slight advantage in synthetic tests. Secondly, the packaging and bundle are quite different between the three. The third and final difference is, although it may seem dull, the sticker on the cooling profile.
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Graphics cards 
