XFX NVIDIA 8800 GTX Graphics Card Review

The new NVIDIA 8800 GTX is a complete departure from the previous generation of NVIDIA 7000 series GPUs. The 8800 GTX utilizes a wealth of features not previously available to graphics cards. I am going to cover the most important changes here, for more details see the NVIDIA or XFX sites.

Unified Shaders

NVIDIA is calling the 8800 GTX and GTS unified, massively parallel shader designs. The 8800 GTX I am reviewing here has 128 individual stream processors that can perform any one of four types of operations dynamically from acting as vertex and pixel shaders to performing geometry or physics operations for the utmost efficiency.

The new unified shader design allows the GPU to pull from all the available stream processors, rather than having individual shaders, like previous 7000 series GPUs, that can only perform one task. The unified shader design allows for the use of all the GPU processing power at any give time.

DirectX 10 Compliant

Both the 8800 GTX and the 8800 GTS are fully DirectX 10 compliant. DirectX 10 has some fantastic new features that will take PC gaming to the next level. The most exciting new feature for DirectX 10 is the ability to perform physic calculations on the GPU.

DirectX 10 also features new Shader Model 4 geometry shaders that NVIDIA claims will unlock a completely new world of graphical effects. We will have to take NVIDIA’s word on that until next year when the DirectX 10 games hit market. Do not let all this talk of DirectX 10 fool you, the 8800 GTX is the top performer for DirectX 9 current game titles.

Image Quality

When NVIDIA says that the image quality of the 8800 GTX is industry leading, they mean it. NVIDIA uses a new engine they call the Lumenex Engine in the 8800 GTX. At the center of this new engine is an advanced new antialiasing technology that allows up to 16x full-screen multisampled antialiasing quality and only costs you the performance loss you would see with 4x multisampled antialiasing. That means much better graphics, with much better performance.

Until now you could not use both HDR and antialiasing at the same time, you had to choose one or the other. With the new 8800 GTX, you can now use both of these features in unison. Oblivion is the game that jumps to mind when I think about these two settings.

You can turn HDR on in the Oblivion game settings menu, then turn antialiasing (AA) on in the NVIDIA control panel, and enjoy both features in the same scene. HDR lighting itself is improved in the new 8800 GTX with 128-bit precision allowing much more realistic shadows and improved detail in very dark and very light areas.

The 8800 GTX can now deliver over 1 billion colors thanks to the entirely new 10-bit display architecture. Previous NVIDIA GPUs could only display 16.7 million colors. This will account for a great increase in picture quality in next generation PC games. All 8800 GPUs are SLI capable as well, with the 8800 GTX having two SLI connectors per card to allow for the use of three 8800 GTXs in a single computer.

Extreme High Definition (XHD) Gaming

Back when the NVIDIA 7900 series cards first launched NVIDIA was talking up XHD gaming. XHD starts at a resolution of 1920 x 1200, but it really gets cooking at 2560 x 1600.

On the previous generations of graphics cards, playable frame rates at 2560 x 1600 on LCDs like the Dell 30” required you to be running two 7950 GX2’s in quad SLI. NVIDIA’s new 8800 GTX can run XHD at 2560 x 1600 on one single 8800 GTX graphics card.

PureVideo HD

NVIDIA put lots of work into the PureVideo HD capabilities of each 8800 GTX and GTS. PureVideo HD is capable of HD resolutions of 720p, 1080i, and 1080p as well as 3:2 and 2:2 pull down. You can also play back HD DVD and Blu-ray with the 8800 GTX using AACS compliant video players and HDCP compliant displays.

NVIDIA broke HQV Benchmark records with the 8800 series GPU scoring 128 out of 130 possible points in the benchmark that tests standard definition video de-interlacing, motion correction, noise reduction, film cadence detection and detail enhancement.

Quantum Effects Physics on GPU

Graphics cards have lacked the raw floating point power to excel at physics until now according to NVIDIA. The 8800 GTX’s 128 stream processors give it fantastic floating point capabilities, and the new physics ability built into DirectX 10 will unlock the potential and off load physics calculations for your CPU to the graphics card. We will be able to see 10,000’s of objects, improved smoke, fire, water, fur, hair and more.

Specifications of the XFX 8800 GTX

The 8800 GTX has the following specifications:

• Fabrication Process: 90 nm
• Number of Transistors: 681 million
• Core clock: 575 MHz
• Shader Clock: 1350 MHz
• Stream Processors: 128
• Memory clock/ data rate: 900 MHz/1800
• Memory Interface: 384 bits
• Memory Bandwidth: 86.4 GB/s
• ROPs: 24
• Frame Buffer Size: 768 MB
• Texture Fill Rate: 36.8 GT/s
• RAMDACs: 400 MHz
• Bus Technology: PCI Express

As you can see from this chart the 8800 GTX adds a third clock speed to the core and memory clocks we normally see. The new clock speed is for the stream processors and can be set and overclocked independently of the other clocks.

Benchmarking the XFX 8800 GTX

I used my normal test suite to benchmark the 8800 GTX consisting of 3DMark06, Quake 4, FEAR and a new addition to my test regime Battlefield 2142. The test system specifications for this review are as follows:

• CPU: Intel X6800 Core 2 Extreme
• Mainboard: abit AW9D-Max
• RAM: Crucial PC2-8000 2 x 1GB
• PSU: OCZ GameXStream 700W
• HDD: 1x Raptor 74 GB, 1x 750 GB Seagate

3DMark06

I ran 3DMark06 with the default application settings and the default 8800 GTX settings. The results are as follows:

• 3D Marks: 10355
• SM 2.0: 4796
• HDR/SM3.0: 4870
• CPU: 2288

To put that in perspective, the quad SLI system I tested only scored 8448 and the X1900 CrossFire system I reviewed only scored 7175. Granted those reviews were done on a system with a different CPU which would account for some of the performance differences.