NVIDIA G80 will be the first DirectX 10-compatible graphics circuit on the high performance market and the rumors about NVIDIA’s coming chip have been many. Now some new unofficial information that strengthen some of the previous rumors, but undermine some of the other, has appeared. According to HardSpell.com, NVIDIA will name the new graphics card series GeForce 8800 and the first cards will be known as 8800GTX and 8800GT. The other information HardSpell has come across is a lot more sensational. First of all G80 will use a unified shader architecture, something no other rumor has stated.
The fact remains that NVIDIA has often appeared to be rather conservative when it comes to using a unified shader architecture. Which has made us believe that ATI R600 will be the first architecture for PCs with unified shaders, similar to its Xenos circuit inside Xbox 360. Earlier rumors has said that NVIDIA would use some sort of dual-core GPU and will wait to introduce unified shaders. Below you can find the specifications published by HardSpell.com.
GeForce 8800 specifications:
- Unified Shader
- Supports FP16 HDR+MSAA
- GDDR4 memory
- Close to 700 million transistors (G71 – 278M / G70 – 302M)
- New AA mode: VCAA
- Core clock scalable up to 1.5GHz
- Shader Peformance : 2x Pixel / 12x Vertex over G71
- 8 TCPs & 128 stream processors
- Much more efficient than traditional architecture
- 384-bit memory interface (256-bit+128-bit)
- 768MB memory size (512MB+256MB)
- Two models at launch : GeForce 8800GTX and GeForce 8800GT
- GeForce 8800GTX : 7 TCPs chip, 384-bit memory interface, hybrid water/fan cooler, water cooling for overclocking. US$649
- GeForce 8800GT : 6 TCPs chip, 320-bit memory interface, fan cooler. US$449-499
The fact that G80 will consist out of incredible 700 million transistors, more than twice the amount of G71, makes it impossible to rule out a dual-core solution. The scaleable clock frequency at even more fantastic 1.5GHz for the core would make it possible to indicate a dual-core solution at 750MHz+750MHz.
But if it would turn out that NVIDIA is really interested in a unified shader architecture it would be mighty interesting to see how it has succeeded in doing this. With an interesting memory constellation of 768MB and a 384-bit memory bus the card should be able to offer more than enough bandwidth.
It seems like the card will offer an enormous heat dissipation, which is hardly surprising if the number of transistors is correct. GeForce 8800 GTX could be the first reference card on the market to use water cooling.
But the contradicting information that has appeared earlier makes it impossible to make any conclusions from this, except from that G80 will certainly be something out of the ordinary. We will of course keep following the development of G80 and keep reprting about when new information surfaces.
