14 DAY TRIAL // It seems NVIDIA has the wrong people working for the PR department. That is because the information about "undisclosed" products keeps appearing everywhere on the Internet. First there was the case of NVIDIA's 8800Ultra which made its way onto Dell's website, and then there is talk of another video card, the NVIDIA 8800GS, which pops up in the driver details, the ForceWare 158.19 driver, that is.
I guess either their guys at the PR department are terrible at what they do or this is some plan to "leak" information, just when ATI is three days away from launching the R600 series of graphics cards. What a coincidence! Not much information regarding the 8800GS is available at the present time, but since I am a betting man, I would bet that the card, which should fill in the gap between the 8800GTS 320MB and the 8600GTS, will have some of the following features. Since there is no 8700-based graphics card in the current NVIDIA line up and seeing that NVIDIA hasn't used the x7xx type of numbering since the elusive GeForce 6700 XL, I don't think they will have a 8700-based graphics card, so, the logical guess would be that it will have a 320-bit memory interface. If by any chance there would be an NVIDIA 8700, it will most surely have a 256-bit memory interface.
Going on to the memory, by having a 320-bit memory controller, it wouldn't make much of a difference whether it has 320MB or 256MB or GDDR3 memory, seeing as how that 320MB difference hasn't affected the 8800GTS series very much. That means the only way to "cripple" that kind of a video card but not to affect the 8800GTS 320MB performance would be to disable a part of the stream processors and leave just 64 of them. At the present time, having a modified type of architecture, such as the one present on the 8600-8500 series, isn't going to bring much joy to the NVIDIA camp, so disabling some of the features of a 8800GTS 320MB in order to create a, probably highly overclockable, 8800GS seems like the right thing to do. Anyway, until we have some official statements from NVIDIA (which could take some time before appearing) these numbers are subject to change, that is, if NVIDIA's PR team doesn't drop another bomb on us.