14 DAY TRIAL // For some time now, there have been rumors all over the Web about the general technical specifications of the new generation of Nvidia graphics processing units. According to most hardware websites and related forums like Hyped Hardware, the next generation of Nvidia GPUs will hit the market during November which is not unusual as the graphics manufacturing company has a fall and spring product release cycle.
The GeForce 9800 series of graphics processing units, GPUs for short, are based on the video processing chip codenamed G92 that is built by the Taiwanese contractor TSMC, using the 65 nanometer fabrication process. The complex architecture of the graphics chip and its capabilities are responsible for the fact that the G92 has over one billion transistors within. Going further than the 8800 series, Nvidia implemented in the G92 chips the second Generation Unified Shader Architecture as well as doubled precision support in the form of the FP64 technologies. As graphics processing units are now known for their parallel computing capabilities, the manufacturing company decided to make good use of them and integrate the GPGPU as a native technology.
Talking about parallel computing capabilities, well, the G92 GPU will hit the one teraflop mark with its shader processing units that comes in a MADD+ADD configuration which translates in 2+1 FLOPS=3 FLOPS per ALU (the shorthand for the arithmetic logic unit). The fully scalar design of the G92 series of GPUs is combined with a 512bit wide memory interface and an extended support for as much as 1GB of GDDR4 graphics memory. Graphics APIs supported are represented by the latest (in fact not yet released) DirectX 10.1 and its open source equivalent, OpenGL 3.0. Other new features of the G92 series are the support for "FREE 4xAA", an audio HDMI compliant chip, a tesselation unit built directly into the graphics core and improved performance and quality output of the AA and AF units.
While pricing for the GeForce 9800 series will vary wildly across the different manufacturers, two price ranges are being shuffled: 549-649 USD for the GeForce 9800 GTX and 399-449 USD for the GeForce 9800 GTS.