nVidia GeForce 8800 GTX Test

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Introduction

Windows Vista is still on to be released early next year and one of the main new features of the operating system will be DirectX 10. Up till now there were no graphics cards on the market that were DirectX 10 compliant, but today brings a change to that statement. nVidia is releasing a new card based on the G80 chip that is fully compliant with DirectX 10 and is the fastest card we have ever come across, the GeForce 8800 GTX. We were lucky enough to get our hands on a sample of Point-of-View and ran it through our extensive test suite. We even have a full set of SLI benchmarks!

To give you a glimpse of the conclusion; the GeForce 8800 is way (and we do mean way!) faster than any card on the market today. A single GeForce 8800 GTX beats both the X1950 CrossFire aswell as the 7900 GTX SLI solutions with ease. One of the most important reasons that it is able to do this is the fact that the G80 has been designed from scratch with some new technologies. Current 3D chips are built up out of vertex shaders and pixel shaders, the G80 works with so-called unified shaders, multifunctional calculation units that can handle any type of 3D calculation you can think of. The G80 sports no less than 128 of these unified shaders, and aided by 768MB of graphics memory the performance of the GeForce 8800 GTX is truly amazing.