That means the GeForce 8800 GT, with its seven SP clusters, can sample a total of 56 texels per clockwell beyond the 24 of the 8800 GTS and 32 of the 8800 GTX. Chip designers don’t tend to do things in odd numbers, so I’d wager an awful lot of Nvidia stock that the G92 actually has at least eight SP clusters onboard.Įight’s probably the limit, though, because the G92’s SP clusters are “fatter” than the G80’s they incorporate the G84’s more robust texture addressing capacity of eight addresses per clock, up from four in the G80. Although this chip has the same basic GeForce 8-series architecture as its predecessors, the GeForce 8800 GT officially has 112 stream processors, or SPs. You see, the GeForce 8800 GT doesn’t look to be a “full” implementation of G92. So where else do the G92’s additional transistors come from? This is where things start to get a little hazy. Still, PCIe 2.0 is a major evolutionary step, though I doubt it chews up too many additional transistors. This may be the least-hyped graphics interface upgrade in years, in part because PCIe 1.1 offers quite a bit of bandwidth already. PCIe 2.0 effectively doubles the bandwidth available for communication between the graphics card and the rest of the system, and the G92 is Nvidia’s first chip to support this standard. The VP2 engine can handle the most intensive portions of H.264 video decoding in hardware, offloading that burden from the CPU.īoth of those capabilities are pulled in from other chips, but here’s a novel one: PCI Express 2.0 support. Another change is the inclusion of the VP2 processing engine for high-definition video decoding and playback, an innovation first introduced in the G84 GPU behind the GeForce 8600 lineup. That ought to make G92-based video cards cheaper and easier to make. The G92 natively supports twin dual-link DVI outputs with HDCP, without the need for a separate display chip. One big change is the integration of the external display chip that acted as a helper to the G80. The answer is: a great many little additions here and there, including some we may not know about just yet. Why, you may be asking, does the G92 have so many more transistors than the G80? Good question. AMD’s R600 GPU packs 700 million transistors into a 420 mm² die area. By way of comparison, the much larger G80made on a 90nm processhad only 681 million transistors. TSMC manufactures the chip for Nvidia on a 65nm fab process, which somewhat miraculously manages to shoehorn roughly 754 million transistors into this space. The G92 measures almost exactly 18 mm by 18 mm, or 324 mm². Er, I mean, to provide some context, size-wise. quarter in order to further propagate the American hegemonic mindset. Here’s an extreme close-up of the G92, which may convince your boss/wife that you’re reading something educational and technically edifying right about now. The G92 adds some nice new capabilities, but doesn’t double up on shader power or anything quite that earth-shaking. ![]() This chip is essentially a die shrink of the G80 graphics processor that powers incumbent GeForce 8800 graphics cards. This fall’s new crop of GPUs looks to be something of a corrective to that trend, and the G92 is a case in point. In recent years, graphics processor transistor budgets have been ballooning at a rate even faster than Moore’s Law, and that has led to some, um, exquisitely plus-sized chips. Could the GeForce 8800 GT be the solution to your video card, er, Crysis? Let’s have a look. ![]() Nvidia has cooked up a new spin of its GeForce 8 GPU architecture, and the first graphics card based on this chip sets a new standard for price and performance. I’ve never seen a prettier low-res slide show.įortunately, DirectX 10-class graphics power is getting a whole lot cheaper, starting today. If you have last year’s best, such as a GeForce 7900 or Radeon X1900, you may not be able to drink in all the eye candy of the latest games at reasonable frame rates.Īnd if you’ve played the Crysis demo, you’re probably really ready to upgrade. The latest generation of high-end graphics cards brought with it pretty much twice the performance of previous high-end cards, and to add insult to injury, these GPUs added DirectX 10-class features that today’s games are starting to exploit. However, this may not be the best time to own a dated graphics card. The slew of top-notch and hotly anticipated games hitting stores shelves is practically unprecedented, including BioShock, Crysis, Quake Wars, Unreal Tournament 3, and Valve’s Orange Box trio of goodness. This is an absolutely spectacular time to be a PC gamer.
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