DirectX 10 is sitting just around the corner, hand in hand with Microsoft Vista. It requires a new unified architecture in the GPU department that neither hardware vendor has implemented yet and is not compatible with DX9 hardware. The NVIDIA G80 architecture, now known as the GeForce 8800 GTX and 8800 GTS, has been the known DX10 candidate for some time, but much of the rumors and information about the chip were just plain wrong, as we can now officially tell you today. Well, we've talked about what a unified architecture is and how Microsoft is using it in DX10 with all the new featurs and options available to game designers. But just what does NVIDIA's unified G80 architecture look like??
All hail G80!! Well, um, okay. That's a lot of pretty colors and boxes and lines and what not, but what does it all mean, and what has changed from the past? First, compared to the architecture of the G71 (GeForce 7900), you'll notice that there is one less "layer" of units to see and understand. Since we are moving from a dual-pipe architecture to a unified one, this makes sense. Those eight blocks of processing units there with the green and blue squares represent the unified architecture and work on pixel, vertex and geometry shading.
The new flagship is the 8800 GTX card, coming in at an expected MSRP with a hard launch; you should be able to find these cards for sale today. The clock speed on the card is 575 MHz, but remember that the 128 stream processors run at 1.35 GHz, and they are labeled as the "shader" clock rate here. The GDDR3 memory is clocked at 900 MHz, and you'll be getting 768MB of it, thanks to the memory configuration iss
ue we talked about before. There are dual dual-link DVI ports and an HDTV output as well.
NVIDIA should be commended once again for being able to pull off a successful hard launch of a product that has been eagerly awaited for months now. Only time will tell us if supply is able to keep up with demand, but I'll be checking in during the week to find out!
