The 8800GT is based upon a G92 core, which is Nvidia’s first 65nm graphics processing unit. The core contains 754 million transistors and 112 shader processors. As with the rest of the 8800 series each of the shader processors can be dynamically allocated to vertex, pixel or geometry operations. There are also 56 texturing processors within the core and these are able to address one operation per clock each. The specifications give the 8800 GT a bilinear fillrate of 33.6 gigatexels.

The G92 is also host to 16 render back end units (ROP’s) which support full 128-bit HDR lighting and 16x Coverage Sample Anti-Aliasing, a Nvidia only technology which is supported natively by titles such as Half-Life 2: Episode 2. The product is advanced in more ways than just the core and there is support in this card for PCI Express 2.0 which increases the bandwidth available to 16GB/s (8GB each way).

The reference clocks for the 8800 GT are 600MHz core, 900MHz memory (256bit bus) and the shader core has a reference clock of 1.5GHz although we see from cards announced already that many manufacturers are exceeding these specifications, some by quite a way.

At this time the cards being launched are all 512Mb models but there will be a 256Mb version launched soon.

In addition to the features aimed at 3D use the 8800 GT should excel in video playback. Firstly the product is HDCP enabled and supports HDMI but the main talking point is that it features Purevideo HD. The inclusion of Purevideo HD allows the card to handle the decoding of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD movies and their various codecs (MPEG-2, VC-1 and H.264). The onboard video processors also handle motion compensation and entropy coding schemes known as Context Adaptive Variable Length Coding (CAVLC) and Context Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding (CABAC). These combined with various other acceleration features mean that the 8800 GT will allow playback of HD media on systems which do not include expensive processors.

Before we look at some of the retail cards in detail it is worth talking about power and cooling requirements. Unlike the 8800 GTS, GTX and Ultra the GT uses a single slot cooler, ideal for smaller systems and cases. Clearly the cooling can be changed by each manufacturer however we found the stock cooling to be effective and quiet which is all that is required. This single slot cooler is made possible by the Power consumption of the GT is 105 watts which is significantly lower than the rest of the 8800 series.