First Pictures: nVidia's G80

The first pictures of the G80 were acquired by PCOnline. From those pictures, it seems that the card will need extra cooling (water based), and 2 6-pin PCIe power connectors to power it. The cooler takes the heat via heat pipes and cools it using the radiator, with a fan to cool the radiator. External holes are also present to connect a pump. Those assumptions were made by The Inquirer that admits it's not sure whether the final cooling system will be air- or water-based.

The G80 graphics processing unit will incorporate 48 pixel shader processors and an unknown number of vertex shader processors, some unofficial sources said. The chip is still expected to support feature-set of DirectX 10 along with Shader Model 4.0, even though it will not take advantage of the unified shader processors that can compute both pixel and vertex shaders.

The G80 is said to have a 400 mm die-size core, and is not focusing so much on DX10, as ATI's R600 seems that it will do better in that domain (G80 has only one third of its die-size dedicated to DX10). However, the G80 won't have competitors on DX9 range.

Early prototype cards of G80 were using 12 memory chips, a strange quantity that gives unusual final numbers, as 384 or 768 MB of GDDR. It is not sure if it will support GDDR3 or GDDR 4, but the pipelines clearly need more memory bandwidth, so the bus would be as wide as 384b. Also, the cost efficiency remains to be proved, because it's clear now that they won't be power efficient (mainly due to that extra power connectors).