NVIDIA's upcoming DirectX 10 part has some rather flabbergasting specifications, if the rumours are correct.

The launch flagship GeForce 8800 GTX, whose core clock is 575 MHz, will apparently have 128 unified Shaders clocked at 1350 MHz. According to my calculations that's an awesome peak pixel fillrate of 172.8 Gigapixel/s (other sources seem to disagree) vs. the current fillrate champion Radeon X1950 XTX's 31.2 Gigapixel/s. That's still 180% faster than a Radeon X1950 XTX Crossfire setup.

Much more significantly, this should translate into a absolutely stunning peak transformation rate of 57.6 GVerticies per second, vs. the mere 2.6 GVerticies achieved by the Radeon X1950 XTX.

But the jaw-droppers don't stop there. The G80 will also come equipped with 768 MB of GDDR3 attached to a 6-channel memory controller clocked at 900 MHz. That's 384-bit/1800 MHz in marketing speak, or 86.4 GB/s, compared again to spec-king X1950 XTX's 64 GB/s as provided by a 2 GHz 2-channel (256-bit) GDDR4

The junior model, GeForce 8800 GTS brings back the old nonclemature from the GeForce 2 days. Originally, GTS meant "Gigatexel Shader" - the GeForce 2 GTS was the first graphics card capable of fillrates in excess of 1 Gigatexel. Now, it's means a 500 MHz Core clock, 96 Unified Shaders clocked at 1200 MHz and 640 MB of GDDR3 on a 5-channel 900 MHz bus (320-bit, 1800 MHz). This gives it a raw fillrate of over 115 times that of the original GTS.

Daily Tech reports.


Unified Shaders are part of the Shader Model 4.0 specified in DirectX 10. In the Shader Model 3.0 and earlier model, texture operations are handled by Pixel Shaders, while vertex operations are handled by Vertex Shaders. In most DirectX 8 compliant graphics controllers and later, there are approximately a third the number of Vertex Shaders as there are Pixel Shaders. This makes fairly good sense in terms of silicon real estate, as Pixel Shaders perform much more complicated algorithms requiring more resources.

A single Unified Shader can perform both Pixel and Vertex operations, in addition to the newly defined Geometry operations, which facilitate the manipulation of entire geometric objects (as opposed to just individual vertices as per Vertex Shader). This radically improves a graphics accelerator’s ability to load balance, but also dramatically improves the accelerator’s peak geometry processing capabilities. As a direct result, objects with poly counts many fold higher will be feasible.

Any guesses on the prices of either of the models?

That's too bad for me; now my 7900GT is going to look like a child's toy compared to those monsters.

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I'm sure they will be the standard price points at market entry. The GeForce 8800 GTX will be however much the GeForce 7800 GTX was on launch. The GeForce 8800 GTS will probably cost as much as the GeForce 7900 GTX does now.

Information leaked from inside ASUS confirms many of the specification details above.

The two launch ASUS products will be

• ASUS EN8800GTX/HTDP/768M - Based on the NVIDIA 8800 GTX, 575 MHz Core, 384-bit 768 MB VRAM operating at 1.3 GHz
• ASUS EN8800GTS/HTDP/640M - Based on NVIDIA 8800 GTX, 500 MHz Core, 320-bit 640 MB VRAM operating at 1.2 GHz

Details on the G80 architecture itself still have not been confirmed. I've seen rumours from a 32/24/?? Pixel/Vertex/Geometry Shader arrangement to the above 128 Unified Shaders. From NVIDIA's comments about Unified Shaders being implemented "When it counts", and various comments on the DirectX 10/Unified Shader thing, I believe that NVIDIA's new chip will feature discrete Shader engines. ATI's next product (R600/X2000) will almost definitely feature a fully fledged unified Shader engine.

Contrary to what I said above, Unified Shaders are NOT a required part of the DirectX 10 specification. This originally seemed to be the case, but apparently isn't so after all. DirectX 10 compliancy hinges on Pixel Shader 4.0 support, most of which means Geometry Shaders, and probably a few tweaks to Pixel and Vertex Shaders. Instead, a Unified Shader language will replace the existing demarcation point between the Pixel and the Vertex. It’s entirely up to the driver how that is handled; whether instructions are despatched to unified Shaders or limited purpose Shaders.

Retail pricing is still not clear.

MyChat posts.

DailyTech have some early benchmarks of the upcoming GeForce 8800 GTX. Performance vaults ahead in a manner typical of this sort of major architectural advance - between half and double that of a Radeon X1950 XTX.

The margin is only likely to increase as NVIDIA tunes the drivers, and even more at the release of Windows Vista. It would appear at this point however that the rumored specifications may have been exaggerated or the card is extremely bottlenecked by the CPU and memory subsystem, as the G80 should be at least 3 times faster than the R580. This will all become clear in the coming weeks, as the launch is expected soon.

DailyTech reports.

Thanks to a manufacturing error, a batch of GeForce 8800 GTX boards received the wrong resistor causing them to malfunction after 4 hours of game play.

NVIDIA say they have recalled the batch and are working hard to correct the issue for the hard-launch, November 8.

Trust X-bit labs to gives us the good. For anyone who wants to know the intimate details of the G80/GeForce 8800 architecture, their article is just what the doctor ordered.

For some reason the G80 reminds me of the NV30 (GeForce FX 5800). A lot of theoretical performance that certainly delivers a punch, but lacks a certain...something. I can't help but wonder if NVIDIA's saving grace these past years has simply been ATI coming late to the party. ATI have had over a year to get to grips with a unified shader concept with the X1000-series, which was a hybrid of theories, so we can surely expect R600 (Radeon X2000?) to pack a punch. GeForce 8800 is obviously impressive in performance, but unless something is significantly holding it back, one would expect much better performance out of 128 unified Shaders clocked at 1.35 GHz. Time will tell.

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