It is here! The first DirectX 10 Graphics Card, the NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTX!

We take a more indepth look at the new architecture of the G80 GPU powering this long and black card.

The GeForce 8800 GTX GPU implements a massively parallel, unified shader design, consisting of 128 individual stream processors running at 1.35 GHz. Each processor is capable of being dynamically allocated to vertex, pixel, geometry, or physics operations for the utmost efficiency in GPU resource allocation, and maximum flexibility in load balancing shader programs. Efficient power utilization and management delivers industry leading performance per watt and performance per square millimeter.

The green units are actually scalar stream processors (SPs), 128 of them in total. The key to GeForce 8800 architecture is the use of numerous scalar stream processors (SPs) to perform shader operations. Stream processors are highly efficient computing engines that perform calculations on an input stream, while producing an output stream that can be used by other stream processors. Stream processors can be grouped in close proximity, and in large numbers, to provide immense parallel processing power. Generally, specialized high-speed instruction decode and execution logic is built into a stream processor, and similar operations are performed on the different elements of a data stream. On-chip memory is typically used to store output of a stream processor, and the memory can be quickly read as input by other stream processors for subsequent processing. SIMD (single instruction/multiple data) instructions can be implemented across groupings of stream processors in an efficient manner, and massively parallel stream processor clusters are well-suited for processing graphics data streams.

To skip this technical portion and jump striaght to the performance review, skip to this page.