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Overview of the 9600 GT

While perhaps not as concept-smashing as was the introduction of the 8800 GTX, the 9600 GT nonetheless shows how far the advancement of GPU technology has come as we enter the early months of 2008.

There is nothing that stands out as revolutionary in the design of 9600GT -- instead, this latest release from NVIDIA is just one more incrementally improved and further optimized step along the road of graphical goodness. Truth be told, the 9600GT does not look like that much of a departure from the 8800GT -- they even look quite similar.

So similar, in fact, that I should tell you which one is which: the 9600GT is on top, and the 8800GT on the bottom:

At the heart of the 9600GT, we have the G94/D9P GPU. NVIDIA believes that one of the strongest new features of the 9600GT is the optimization of the G94's stream processors. These new stream processors operate at a frequency 20% higher than the first-generation of stream processors released with the 8800 GTX. The 9600GT has only 64 stream processors, yet should compete quite well to other NVIDIA cards with around twice this amount of SP's thanks to these new optimizations.

The 9600GT's texture engine has also been retooled:  It now has twice the addressing capabilities, and can process eight texels per cycle. The ROP sub-system has also been improved, specifically for performance at high resolutions.

That's all the big changes brought with the 9600GT. Let's see what Palit has to say on the matter, and take a look at the 9600GT Sonic.