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Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX Review
Thursday, November 16th, 2006
The Windows Vista era won’t officially begin until Microsoft finally ships its new operating system 
next January, but PC game enthusiasts will get next-gen PC graphics performance a few months early because Nvidia is ready to ship its new GeForce 8800 GTX and GTS video cards. The GeForce 8800 series GPUs are designed specifically to support DirectX 10, but the chips also feature a new unified shader architecture that will speed up performance in DirectX 9 games on Windows XP.
Nvidia is only shipping the high-end GeForce 8 GPUs for the holiday season. The GeForce 8800 GTX has a $600 MSRP, and the slightly less-powerful GTS will retail for $450. [Update 11/9/06: Online retailers are currently selling the cards for $50 over MSRP.] Instead of the usual 512MB or 256MB memory sizes, the GTX has 768MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 900MHz and the GTS has 640MB clocked at 800MHz.
Choosing the premium GTX model will get you 128 floating-point processors, compared to 96 processors on the GTS. The GTX processors are also faster, clocked at 1.35GHz, which is 150MHz faster than the GTS’s 1.2GHz processors. If those processor speeds seem higher than usual, it’s because they are–Nvidia clocked the GeForce 8800’s processors independently from the rest of the GPU core for higher performance and to increase performance-per-watt power efficiency. The GeForce 8800 has a record-breaking 681 million transistors, twice as many transistors as the GeForce 7900. Nvidia recommends a 450W power supply for GTX-based cards and 400W for GTS cards. The GTX card also requires two PCIe power connectors. Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX Hands-On Preview - Features at GameSpot
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