14 DAY TRIAL // The mighty 8800 GTX is officially on the market. In the early evening of November the 8th, Nvidia finally released the new video cards as well as the new 600i mainboard line. You can say the wait is over. Obviously, some of you may already possess an 8800 GPU inside your PC, due to Nvidia's strategy of releasing some engineering samples before the launch (sounds kind of INTEL like) but for 99% of you gamers, this is the day when you leap forward.
We've been discussing about DirectX 10 capabilities for the last two weeks, so another topic on that would just ruin the fun. I will say this much though: When it comes to rendering capabilities, the G80 series is indeed powerful, but not because 128-bit HDR or some other weird named 3D rendering effect, but mainly because of its adaptability. By using 128 unified shaders, this board can cope better with the following DirectX by making use of shader units in a dynamic way according to the needs. And this adaptability gives it a power comparable to a SLI system running two 7950 video cards. That's actually pretty impressive since the little monster comes 6 months after 7900 series being launched. Such a jump cannot be ignored.
Counting 681 million transistors, a G80 GPU is quite an expensive beast which is worth double its weight in gold. But it surely delivers. About the unified shader technology, Nvidia said: "The GeForce 8800 design team realized that extreme amounts of hardware-based shading horsepower would be necessary for high-end DirectX 10 3D games. While DirectX 10 specifies a unified instruction set, it does not demand a unified GPU shader design, but Nvidia GeForce 8800 engineers believed a unified GPU shader architecture made most sense to allow effective DirectX 10 shader program load-balancing, efficient GPU power utilization and significantly improved GPU architectural efficiency."
And there you have it. The new king comes flooding the market with several manufacturers already offering their G80 based products. Maybe availability will be a problem in the next weeks, maybe not. It's all up to the manufacturers right now.