Unified Shaders On A Rampage!
The NVIDIA G80 (8800GTX), with 128 Shader units, is the first DirectX 10 compatible graphics card ever. The card sports an attractive-looking cooling solution well in keeping with such a large card (it’s 11 inches long). Testing saw the card running a bit hotter than the G70 and G71 series. It ran at 80 degrees under load; the G71 had rarely crossed the 60 degree mark!
The G80 has 768 MB of GDDR3 memory (1.8 GHz). F.E.A.R. saw a staggering 150 fps at 1024 x 768 with 4x Antialiasing (AA) and Anisotropic Filtering (AF) enabled. Similarly, Prey saw just over 202 fps at 1280 x 1024, at the highest settings.
For now, this is the fastest DirectX 9 card ever! Did we mention it supports SLI as well as Quad SLI? ATI’s response-the R600 is highly anticipated, and if it’s anywhere in the performance region of the G80, we should be getting a lot more realism in our games a whole lot sooner than we could’ve imagined!
Specifications
681 million transistors; 128 shader units (Unified Shader Architecture); 575 MHz core speed; 1350 MHz Shader speed; 1800 MHz memory speed (GDDR3); 384-bit memory architecture