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Update: Power consumption numbers have now been made available on the last page!

Introduction

It is an odd situation indeed when technology is entirely obsolesced within eight months of release, but it is a pattern that NVIDIA are clearly promoting. The release of the 7800 GTX in June of 2005 was really quite a groundbreaking leap in performance. By March of this year however, a marginally faster 7900 GT could be had for just nearly half the price that the 7800 GTX originally released for. Arguably not a simple refresh product, the 7900 GTX brought even greater levels of performance to the high end segment, only to be overshadowed by the 7950 GX2 three months later (as far as single cards go).

One would assume that this rapid product release pace would eventually have to stop somewhere. The rumors, however, began flying faster than ever soon after the 7900 series release that NVIDIA's first DirectX 10 product was expected to ship within the year! Along with these tidbits were rumblings of massive power requirements and seperate power supplies designed specifically to handle the new DirectX GPU's from NVIDIA as well as from ATI. These rumors reaffirmed that NVIDIA was not simply making a DirectX 10 compatible 7900, but instead were pushing for an entirely new, presumably immensely powerful, GPU architecture.

This brings us to the past month where we have seen most, if not all of the details surrounding today's release hit the internet in one form or another. These details only solidified everyone's ideas on how new and improved this card was actually going to be. NVIDIA have spent four years developing the G80 which is being brought to retail in two forms, as the GeForce 8800 GTX and the GeForce 8800 GTS. We will be taking a look at the all new architecture to see what's changed as well as looking at our card specifically, the GeForce 8800 GTS from BFG.


Before we dive into the details however, here is a chart highlighting the specifications of the two new cards. There are likely a couple of perplexing numbers there and we will be covering those over the next few pages so keep reading!

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