Introduction

Today NVIDIA announced their new GeForce 8800 GT Series using the all-new G92 GPU. The GPU is made on a 65nm process, based on the G80 of the 8800 GTS/GTX/Ultra. The card is set to replace the 8800 GTS 320 MB which will be phased out soon (the 640 MB version will stay for now). A 65nm process allowed NVIDIA to manufacture the chip cheaper, with less heat output and to add additional features. For example the display output logic, which was on a separate chip on the 8800 GTX has been integrated into the GPU core. Also the new HD video decode acceleration features have been ported over from the G86, so you can now benefit from full VC-1 and H.264 decode acceleration. HDMI + Audio is not part of the NVIDIA reference design, but this can be added by 3rd party vendors easily. Unlike the 8500/8600 Series, the GPU uses a 256-bit memory bus which doubles the available memory bandwidth for applications. The number of shaders has been set to 112 compared to 96 on the 8800 GTS. This should increase performance in modern games which use a lot of shaders.

Zotac as one of NVIDIA's premier vendors took the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT reference design and increased the clock speed by 60 MHz - for no extra price. Actually all Zotac 8800 GT cards will have those higher clocks which will give a nice performance advantage over the competition. An "AMP! Edition" card will also be available which uses even higher clocks of 700 MHz core and 1000 MHz memory for a price premium of $10.

Complete Specifications

NVIDIA® Unified Architecture

• Unified shader architecture
• GigaThread™ technology
• Full support for Microsoft® DirectX® 10
• Geometry shaders
• Geometry instancing
• Streamed output
• Shader Model 4.0
• Full 128-bit floating point precision through the entire rendering pipeline

NVIDIA Lumenex™ Engine

• 16x full screen anti-aliasing
• Transparent multisampling and transparent supersampling
• 16x angle independent anisotropic filtering
• 128-bit floating point high dynamic-range (HDR) lighting with anti-aliasing
• 32-bit per component floating point texture filtering and blending
• Advanced lossless compression algorithms for color, texture, and z-data
• Support for normal map compression
• Z-cull
• Early-Z

NVIDIA Quantum Effects™ Technology

• Advanced shader processors architected for physics computation
• Simulate and render physics effects on the graphics processor

NVIDIA SLI™ Technology

• Patented hardware and software technology allows two GeForce-based graphics cards to run in parallel to scale performance and enhance image quality on today's top titles.

NVIDIA PureVideo™ HD Technology

• Dedicated on-chip video processor
• High-definition H.264, VC-1, MPEG2 and WMV9 decode acceleration
• Advanced spatial-temporal de-interlacing
• HDCP capable3
• Spatial-Temporal De-Interlacing
• Noise Reduction
• Edge Enhancement
• Bad Edit Correction
• Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
• High-quality scaling
• Video color correction
• Microsoft® Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) support

Advanced Display Functionality

• Two dual-link DVI outputs for digital flat panel display resolutions up to 2560x1600
• One dual-link DVI outputs for digital flat panel display resolutions up to 2560x16004
• Dual integrated 400MHz RAMDACs for analog display resolutions up to and including 2048x1536 at 85Hz
• Integrated HDTV encoder provides analog TV-output (Component/Composite/S-Video) up to 1080i resolution
• NVIDIA nView® multi-display technology capability
• 10-bit display processing

Built for Microsoft® Windows Vista™

• Full DirectX 10 support
• Dedicated graphics processor powers the new Windows Vista Aero 3D user interface
• VMR-based video architecture

High Speed Interfaces

• Designed for PCI Express® x16
• Designed for high-speed GDDR3 and DDR2 memory

Operating Systems

• Built for Microsoft Windows Vista
• Windows XP/Windows XP 64
• Linux

API Support

• Complete DirectX support, including Microsoft DirectX 10 Shader Model 4.0
• Full OpenGL® support, including OpenGL 2.0