14 DAY TRIAL // Currently gamers and computer power users have only two realistic choices when it comes to high performance graphics cards and those two choices are linked with the AMD Radeon HD 2900 XT and the Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra, both graphics processing units being on almost the same performance level and with not very different pricing schemes.
For users that do not feel that the absolute best in graphics performance is really necessary, there is a broader range of choices and one of the most sought after graphics processing units from the still high performance category is the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS, that according to the news site vr-zone, is going to receive a pretty important hardware upgrade.
It looks as if the green graphics cards producing company is looking to roll out yet another iteration of the GeForce 8800 GTS and this time users may expect a product that comes with more stream programmable processing units, that will increase the graphics performance of the chip, while also creating a wider gap in terms of pure computing power between the GTS and the incoming GT. As the GT version of the GeForce 8800 graphics processing unit is going to sport a lower price tag, a close performance level to the GTS model would most surely hurt the sales of the more expensive unit, so Nvidia makes sure that users will be attracted by either a better performance or by a lower price tag.
Right now, the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS is coming equipped with 96 stream programmable processing units and the manufacturing company plans to increase their number to 112, a move that will boost performance while keeping the GTS version away from the top of the line and king of the hill 8800 Ultra graphics card.
Apart from the increased number of stream processing units, there will be no difference between the two iterations of the GeForce 8800 GTS graphics processing unit, as the operating frequencies are still at the 500MHz/800MHz and the memory interface used is still 320-bits wide. An interesting point is that Nvidia will not sell the new iteration of the 8800 GTS GPU in a different form, nor will it officially announce the transition, letting the card manufacturing companies to notify users of the changes, so pay attention when you buy your next graphics card.