Nvidia Geforce 8800 GTX

rSince late August this year, rumors about the Nvidia’s G80 were coming in fast, furious and from all over. From hearsays of its fantastic new core to its mysterious physics support, the air was rife with speculation. Initially we did not put too much stock into the news. However, when we finally got hold of the GeForce 8800 GTX, we put it through the grind.

Nvidia has finally lifted the NDA on the G80 and allowed us to announce its fantastic specifications. The new G80 GPUs mark the arrival of the world’s first DirectX 10 card along with a boatload of new features that puts these new cards heads and shoulders above anything that ATI/AMD offer right now. Before we embark on our exploration of the new core let us quickly run down through some of the basic features that have changed or been introduced.

Clock speed and Physical Dimensions
The GeForce 8800 GTX is clocked at 575 Mhz-core clock and 900 MHz -memory speed, which runs on a 384 Bit Bus. The new ‘Stream Processors’ (we will just talk about that in a minute) run at a speed of 1350 MHz. The RAM being used is still GDDR3. Overall this may seem a tad slow but this is not where all the optimization has taken place. The card’s new unified shader design now pushes nearly 86.4 GB of memory, which is seriously a lot of memory bandwidth.

Physically the card is a monster. It is extremely long and quite easily dwarfs its younger brother—the GeForce 7950 GX2. It is so big now that the power connectors for the card have been moved to the top of the card from its traditional side position. It’s PCB is a beautiful black, which is something you do not see everyday. The card’s HSF (Heatsink Fan) is huge but surprisingly runs quite silently. The card has two DVI connectors and surprisingly two SLI connectors, which we believe maybe a move for future readiness. In terms of power requirements, the card with its heavier power requirements will now need two PCIe power connectors and Nvidia recommends that this card be run with nothing less than a 450W PSU.
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Below is a list of some changes and new features introduced in this card.

Programmable Shaders.
The flagship model 8800 GTX marks the arrival of a new unified shader design which kills the entire concept of dedicated pipelines, instead moving towards programmable ‘stream processors’ running at 1.35 GHz. These can be allocated dynamically as per need into vertex, pixel, geometry or physics operations.

DirectX 10 Compatibility
The entire range of 8800 series card, out of the box, supports Microsoft’s upcoming DirectX 10 which will be introduced in Windows Vista. DirectX 10 promises to bring extremely realistic gaming to the table and Nvidia not wanting to miss out has jumped onto the bandwagon. This is amply proven by the fact that Shader Model 4.0 support is present on the card, which will be implemented only in DirectX 10. The card of course is also DX9 compatible and is an absolute screamer. It is positively the fastest DX9 card in existence right now. This is quite apparent in our benchmarks.

Lumenex Engine
The power of the new card can be gauged with the introduction of the new Lumenex Engine. 16x Anti-aliasing, which in earlier forms was only available on SLI setups, makes its appearance here. The flagship 8800 GTX is fully capable of running 16x AA using a single GPU. This gives extraordinary picture quality and sharpness to games. The new control panel (we will talk more about this in our upcoming 680i motherboard review) allows you to override a game’s existing AA/AF settings and forces it to use the new CSAA method being introduced here. CSAA (Coverage Sampled Anti-Aliasing) is an efficient new AA method that will have the same performance loss that 4x AA earlier did but will allow you to now have 8 and 16x AA.

Nvidia has not rested just yet. The company has been raked over the coals, by gamers for not allowing them to run HDR with AA in games like Oblivion. To rub it in further ATI hardware had support for both HDR+AA. Nvidia has fixed this problem and now every known kind of anti-aliasing mode runs across the board. It is now possible to enable AA from Nvidia’s control panel and HDR from the respective games options and enjoy sharp clean images. Thinking ahead, Nvidia has introduced a new 128-bit AA support mode. This is a feature, we may not see game developers using for some time to come.

PureVideo HD
Nvidia has had its PureVideo program running for sometime now. The entire premise of the PureVideo program has been taken forward as now both the 8800 GTX and GTS support both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Hi-Def playback out of the box. The new HD version is capable of outputting 720p, 1080i and 1080p. Movies developed on either technology can be played on PCs with compliant movie players from companies like Cyberlink and Nero.

Quantum Effects GPU-Based Physics
Physics has finally made an appearance in the Geforce 8800 GTX. The 8800 series cards have their physics efforts handled by GPU and this will help in far more accurate gameplay and realism as game developers start exploiting this new move. An example of where this will help out will be in the rendering of more realistic smoke and fog, thousands of individual actions being dynamically rendered such as an exploding building and the behavior of an insect swarm.
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Benchmarks/Test Bed

As you can see we had a totally decked out machine, with virtually all the components being the fastest, available in their respective category. From Nvidia’s new 680 SLI board to the Core 2 Extreme and the new SLI RAM the testbed is one mean machine.

To test the performance of the new, card we decided to compare it to the previous generation’s best products namely the ATI Radeon 1950XTX and Nvidia’s own 7950 GX2. We used the 7950 GX2 as our base for the tests. The following software and games have been used for the tests:

3DMark 2006 - This really needs no introduction. It is the perfect solution for anyone who wishes to measure overall system and graphic performance.

F.E.A.R - This game has over the past year or so has become a staple for tests. It’s visually one of the most demanding games ever made and has spent the last year trying to kill every graphic card out there.

Prey - Though this game is based on the Doom3 engine, Human Head Studios has tweaked the graphics to a new level. The game pushes graphics cards hard and is quite unforgiving.
Company of Heroes
- Recently introduced, this game features a brand new Essence engine, which has been rewritten from scratch by Relic, to use newer features such as HDR, dynamic lighting and shadows. Being an RTS it pushes out a lot of detail and graphically very appealing.
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For the games, the resolutions we tested were at 1024x768, 1600x1200 and 1920x1200. Each game was run three times to eliminate any problems and arrive at actual figures.

Prey
The performance jump here is just phenomenal. We ran the test several times and each time the scores were near identical. The new card really shows off its strength easily killing both the 1950 XTX and 7950 GX2 with nearly 40 percent jumps at the higher resolutions.

F.E.A.R
The rampage continues. F.E.A.R seems to have finally found its match. A 51 percent jump at 1920x1200 is nothing short of incredible.

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Company of Heroes**
The card does not seem to be slowing down. As much as a 49 percent jump has been registered at higher resolutions.

3DMark2006
3DMark2006 sees a fantastic jump of nearly 69 percent. We were easily able to cross 10200 3DMark points across multiple runs.

Conclusion
Nvidia has pulled an ‘Intel’ this time round. As Intel’s Core 2 Duo platform brought incredible performance increases in CPUs, Nvidia has managed to do the same with its new flagship GPU. Though gaming at resolutions of 1920x1200 is not new, at times it was a frustrating experience with slowdowns in intense games. All this has changed with the 8800 GTX. The new card has managed to consistently achieve 30-50 percent jumps in performance at these resolutions.

Priced at close to Rs. 42,000 this card is clearly not for everyone. If you are one of those guys (like me) who will spare no effort in making his gaming enjoyable the card promises a tangible enough boost to actually consider a jump.