NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT: The Only Card That Matters

The Card

The GeForce 8800 GT, whose heart is a G92 GPU, is quite a sleek card. The heatsink shroud covers the entire length of the card so that no capacitors are exposed. The card's thermal envelop is low enough, thanks to the 65nm G92, to require only a single slot cooling solution. Here's a look at the card itself:



The card makes use of two dual-link DVI outputs and a third output for analog HD and other applications. We see a single SLI connector on top of the card, and a single 6-pin PCIe power connector on the back of the card. NVIDIA reports the maximum dissipated power as 105W, which falls within the 150W power envelope provided by the combination of one PCIe power connector and the PCIe x16 slot itself.

The fact that this thing is 65nm has given rise to at least one vendor attempting to build an 8800 GT with a passive cooler. While the 8800 GT does use less power than other cards in its class, we will have to wait and see if passive cooling will remain stable even through the most rigorous tests we can put it through.

Earlier this summer we reviewed NVIDIA's VP2 hardware in the form of the 8600 GTS. The 8800 GTX and GTS both lacked the faster video decode hardware of the lower end 8 Series hardware, but the 8800 GT changes all that. We now have a very fast GPU that includes full H.246 offload capability. Most of the VC-1 pipeline is also offloaded by the GPU, but the entropy encoding used in VC-1 is not hardware accelerated by NVIDIA hardware. This is less important in VC-1, as the decode process is much less strenuous. To recap the pipeline, here is a comparison of different video decode hardware:



NVIDIA's VP2 hardware matches the bottom line for H.264, and the line above for VC-1 and MPEG-2. This includes the 8800 GT.

We aren't including any new tests here, as we can expect performance on the same level as the 8600 GTS. This means a score of 100 under HD HQV, and very low CPU utilization even on lower end dual core processors.

Let's take a look at how this card stacks up against the rest of the lineup:

Form Factor	8800 GTX	8800 GTS	8800 GT	8600 GTS
Stream Processors	128	96	112	32
Texture Address / Filtering	32 / 64	24 / 48	56 / 56	16 / 16
ROPs	24	20	16	8
Core Clock	575MHz	500MHz	600MHz	675MHz
Shader Clock	1.35GHz	1.2GHz	1.5GHz	1.45GHz
Memory Clock	1.8GHz	1.6GHz	1.8GHz	2.0GHz
Memory Bus Width	384-bit	320-bit	256-bit	128-bit
Frame Buffer	768MB	640MB / 320MB	512MB / 256MB	256MB
Transistor Count	681M	681M	754M	289M
Manufacturing Process	TSMC 90nm	TSMC 90nm	TSMC 65nm	TSMC 80nm
Price Point	$500 - $600	$270 - $450	$199 - $249	$140 - $199

On paper, the 8800 GT completely gets rid of the point of the 8800 GTS. The 8800 GT has more shader processing power, can address and filter more textures per clock, and only falls short in the number of pixels it can write out to memory per clock and overall memory bandwidth. Even then, the memory bandwidth advantage of the 8800 GTS isn't that great (64GB/s vs. 57.6GB/s), amounting to only 11% thanks to the 8800 GT's slightly higher memory clock. If the 8800 GT does end up performing the same, if not better, than the 8800 GTS then NVIDIA will have truly thrown down an amazing hand.

You see, the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB was an incredible performer upon its release, but it was still priced too high for the mainstream. NVIDIA turned up the heat with a 320MB version, which you'll remember performed virtually identically to the 640MB while bringing the price down to $300. With the 320MB GTS, NVIDIA gave us the performance of its $400 card for $300, and now with the 8800 GT, NVIDIA looks like it's going to give us that same performance for $200. And all this without a significant threat from AMD.

Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, we'll need to see how the 8800 GT and 8800 GTS 320MB really do stack up. On paper the decision is clear, but we need some numbers to be sure. And we can't get to the numbers until we cover a couple more bases The only other physical point of interest about the 8800 GT is the fact that it takes advantage of the PCIe 2.0 specification. Let's take a look at what that really means right now.