NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT Graphics Card:The Ultimate Gammers Paradise

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT Graphics Card

Ah the wild, wild world of hardware manufacturing! Intel has decided to bump forward its NDA on Penryn’s performance to before its launch. Hey! Why not? NVIDIA has already managed the same maneuver to be sure to precede the new Radeon HD 3000 release! Hence comes the second major review published today, after months of wandering in the wilderness, waiting for those new products to deem it time to show up, with (of course) the availability of last minute of test samples and drivers. It’s not like we were closing on a specific date or even a particular season, one traditionally good for manufacturer’s sales or anything like that…

The behavior of the two graphic cards giants is all the more unusual (and reprehensible) after the launch of their new Direct X 10 architectures. Generally, high end cards quickly give way to mid-range cards with more interesting performance-to-price ratios. This time it hasn’t worked, in part because of the cost of transistors the new architectures brings (due to new API support and unified architecture), making the arrival of new (cheap-to-produce) GPUs harder, but efficient using a process that has been mastered couple of months ago. NVIDIA was first with its disappointing GeForce 8600 GTS and GT, and yet hardly measured up to by the Radeon HD 2600 that arrived later on. Never since, perhaps, the first GeForce 3 had the gap between high end and mid-range, been so important. This gap pleased manufacturers (especially NVIDIA), since gamers logically abandoned those cards in favor of the less out of reach high end models, with the GeForce 8800 GTS 320 MB in the spotlight. The card was introduced at the beginning of the year for no less than $300.

Finally, manufacturers decided it was time to offer genuine mid-range items, reasonably close to the high end ones in terms of performance. They’ve also gotten great help, from the availability of new processes in foundries (TSMC leading the way).

Is the GeForce 8800 GT the ultimate card for broke gamers?

Nvidia has been introducing affordable products for medium range users for sometime now. The GS and GT series represent the vision of Nvidia towards good performance and a price that will please most users. Recently, Nvidia introduced its latest creation, the 8800GT series, which promises to rock your gaming world. The GeForce 8800 GT was announced on October 29th by Nvidia as an answer to enthusiast gamers demands for high-performance graphics.

The recently released DirectX10 games Crysis, Hellgate: London, and Gears of War really need a powerful GPU, which Nvidia now offers at the $199 - $259 price range. The new 8800GT series include 112 stream processors and a 256-bit frame buffer interface running at 900MHz, while Nvidia has revised the PureVideo HD engine that promises even better Blu-ray and HD-DVD movie picture quality than the previous generation.

Lastly, it is PCI Express 2.0 bus architecture certified, even though not many motherboards on the market currently support this new interface. Below is a table that illustrates the major features of the various 8800 models in terms of core/shader/memory clocks and interface bandwidth.

	Core Clock (MHz)	Shader Clock (MHz)	Memory Clock (MHz)	Memory Amount	Memory Interface	Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec)	Texture Fill Rate (billion/sec)
GeForce 8800 Ultra	612	1500	1080	768MB	384-bit	103.7	39.2
GeForce 8800 GTX	575	1350	900	768MB	384-bit	86.4	36.8
GeForce 8800 GT	600	1500	900	512MB	256-bit	57.6	33.6
GeForce 8800 GTS	500	1200	800	640MB or 320MB	320-bit	64	24
GeForce 8600 GTS	675	1450	1000	256MB	128-bit	32	10.8
GeForce 8600 GT	540	1190	700	256MB	128-bit	22.4	8.64
GeForce 8500 GT	450	900	400	256MB	128-bit	12.8	3.6
GeForce 8400 GS	450	900	400	256MB	64-bit	6.4	3.6

The GeForce 8800GT comes with a blazing 600MHz core, 1500MHz shader and 900MHz memory clocks that place it above the 8800GTS series. Moreover, it has 512MB of on-board memory with 256 bits of bandwidth.