nVidia has officially named its G80 chip and announced the first two boards to carry its architecture, the GeForce 8800 GTX and GeForce 8800 GTS, revealing their hardware specifications.
The anticipated launch for these cards is November 8, 2006 although the company has not confirmed that date.
The GeForce 8800 GTX will serve as the flagship product for the company and will support DX10 and shader model 4.0 as we expected and will feature a stunning 128 pixel pipelines, a number which becomes even more impressive when considering that the current pipeline peak is the 48 found on ATI's X1950XTX and that the current nVidia peak is the 32 on GeForce 7900GTX.
The full GeForce 8800 GTX specs are:
GeForce 8800GTX
Core clock: 575MHz
Pixel pipelines: 128 @ 1350 MHz
Memory: 768MB DDR3 @ 900 MHz
Memory interface: 384-bit
Memory bandwidth: 86GB/s
The GeForce 8800 GTS will be a lower end model but only when compares to the GTX as it will still feature 96 pixel pipelines. The GeForce 8800 GTS full specs are:
Core clock: 500MHz
Pixel pipelines: 96 @ 1200 MHz
Memory: 640MB DDR3 @ 900 MHz
Memory interface: 320-bit
Memory bandwidth: 64GB/s
The company has also issued recommended power ratings for these new beasts as they will feature two PCI-Express slots in order to receive the juice they require to run; a 450W power supply will be the minimum requirement for a GF 8800 GTX and a 400W for a GF 8800 GTS. If you have more money than sense and decide to run two of these babies in an SLI setup you will need a minimum 800W power supply.
DX10 games are unlikely to surface before 2007 and around Q1 of the same year ATI plans to introduce its own DX10 offering. The Canadians are running a little behind their rivals although this seems to be a repeat of the Shader Model 3.0 support saga. The question now is; how many people will be willing to buy DX10 cards before Vista (the only OS to support DX10) and games featuring the technology are available?