While not a new architecture, the GPU behind the 8800 GT has certainly been massaged quite a bit from the G80. The G92 is fabbed on a 65nm process, and even though it has fewer SPs, less texturing power, and not as many ROPs as the G80, it's made up of more transistors (754M vs. 681M). This is partly due to the fact that G92 integrates the updated video processing engine (VP2), and the display engine that previously resided off chip. Now, all the display logic including TMDS hardware is integrated onto the GPU itself.

In addition to the new features, there have been some enhancements to the architecture that likely added a few million transistors here and there as well. While we were unable to get any really good details, we were told that lossless compression ratios were increased in order to enable better performance at higher resolutions over the lower bandwidth memory bus attached to the G92 on 8800 GT. We also know that the proportion of texture address units to texture filtering units has increased to a 1:1 ratio (similar to the 8600 GTS, but in a context where we can actually expect decent performance). This should also improve memory bandwidth usage and texturing power in general.

On paper, the 8800 GT completely gets rid of the point of the 8800 GTS. The 8800 GT has more shader processing power, can address and filter more textures per clock, and only falls short in the number of pixels it can write out to memory per clock and overall memory bandwidth. Even then, the memory bandwidth advantage of the 8800 GTS isn't that great (64GB/s vs. 57.6GB/s), amounting to only 11% thanks to the 8800 GT's slightly higher memory clock. If the 8800 GT does end up performing the same, if not better, than the 8800 GTS then NVIDIA will have truly thrown down an amazing hand.

As we've mentioned, on paper the 8800 GT looks much better in every area except for memory bandwidth. Even though memory size is an advantage for the 640MB card, we know from experience that the added memory size really doesn't net us much in the way of performance except in the most extreme circumstances. So we certainly expect the 8800 GT to outperform both the more expensive 8800 GTS 320MB and (by extension) the 8800 GTS 640MB. Essentially, this should give us the performance of a $400 card for $200 - $250. Quite a good deal no matter how you slice it.

And from the first, our expectations are upheld and then some. The 8800 GT does top the GTS. This seals the deal: the 8800 GTS is no longer a viable product.

The 8800 GT draws less power than anything that competes with it in terms of performance. When G80 hit last year, we made a big deal out of how power related to performance. This card simply blows everything else away in terms of how much little power is needed to attain incredible performance.

This launch really has the potential to introduce a card that could leave the same lasting impression on the computer industry that the Ti4200 left all those years ago. This kind of inflection point doesn't come along every year, or even every generation. But when architecture, process enhancements, and design decisions line up just right, the potential for a revolutionary product is high.

The G92 thus integrates 754 million transistors; an 11% increase compared to the G80's 681 million. Yet, the number of computational units decreases; we go from 128 stream processors to 112, but we must keep in mind that, on the 8800GTS, only 96 of them are active. Accordingly, the number of texturing units increases from 48 to 56. Finally, thanks to the 65 nm process, the die's surface shrinks 33%, although its size is still twice as big as a G84.

Regarding the clock, Nvidia has pushed the G92's stream processors to no less than 1.5 GHz. At the end of the day, the GeForce 8800GT has a computational power 46% higher than that of the 8800GTS and merely 3% lower than the 8800GTX! The only downside is memory bandwidth decreasing by 10% (still in comparison to the 8800GTS).

Strengthened by the 65 nm process, the GeForce 8800GT displays interesting power consumption levels; it's slightly lower compared to an 8800GTS 320 MB (we win 18 W when idle and 13 W under Age of Empires III, after subtracting the PSU's losses).

After that, we enter discreet grounds, and the GeForce 8800GT still walks a flawless path by still being as discreet as, if not more so than, the other GeForce 8800.

In the end, Nvidia has taken its time, but offers an exceptional card with the GeForce 8800GT. For about $230 it nearly displays the power of a GeForce 8800GTX (under 3% ) twice as expensive, with the only downside being a slightly lower memory capacity (512 MB instead of 768 MB) and a bandwidth 10% lower than that of a GeForce 8800GTS. However, in games, the latter is usually outperformed by 30% without filters (using the 320 MB version) by the GeForce 8800GT and the GTX is only 12% higher.