Graphics cards continue to get more and more powerful and with NVIDIA's newest generation of 8800 series graphics cards, like the 8800 GTX we are reviewing here, the card is more powerful than two of the previous generation 7950 GX2 cards and the 8800 GTX stands head, shoulders, knees, toes and stilts higher than anything ATI brings to the table. Has NVIDIA has pulled out all the stops and delivered the best graphics card ever? Read on to find out if the 8800 GTX the bee's knees or not.

Unified Shader Design

The new NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX is the first graphics card from NVIDIA to utilize a unified shader design. The 8800 GTX GPU has 128 individual stream processors running at 1.35 GHz. Each of these individual stream processors is capable of being dynamically allocated to one of four different uses; vertex, pixel, geometry or physics operations. This ensures that there are always the best mix of different types of processing units available in a specific scene and allows better utilization of GPU resources.

For instance in the older 7900 series cards you had a specific number of each shader type and if you had a scene that needed more vertex shaders and not many pixel shaders, you would have portions of the GPU sitting idle and unused. With this new unified stream processor design, none of the GPU's processing power will go unused making for higher performance.

Designed for DirectX 10

The new 8000 series of graphics cards including the 8800 GTX and 8800 GTS are designed from the ground up to support DirectX 10 and all the improvements it brings to the table for PC gaming. One of the most important features of the upcoming DirectX 10 is the Shader Model 4.0 and the 8800 GTX is fully compliant with SM4.0.

NVIDIA's new 8800 GPUs are the first shipping cards that are compliant with DX10. That is not to say that the new 8800 GTX doesn?t excel at DirectX 9 based current generation PC games, it is an absolutely phenomenal performer in current DX9 game titles, as we will see later in the benchmarking section of this review.

Lumenex Engine

NVIDIA has improved graphics quality with the new 8800 GTX significantly over the 7000 series GPUs with the new Lumenex Engine. The new engine allows for the first time the ability to perform 16x multi-sampled antialiasing using a single GPU. Previously it required something along the lines of dual 7950 GX2's running in quad SLI mode to get these levels of AA and AF.

NVIDIA also tweaked HDR (high dynamic range) lighting capabilities for the 8800 GTX. HDR allows for dark objects to look dark without loosing the detail levels they have when they are really brightly lit. The 8800 series card can also use HDR and angle-independent anisotropic filtering at the same time. That means that in current games like Oblivion you can use HDR and AA at the same time by running HDR in the games option area and enabling AA in the NVIDIA control panel.

The Lumenex Engine uses a new from the ground up 10-bit display architecture that works in concert with 10-bit DACs to deliver over a billion colors as compared to the 16.7 million colors prior generations of NVIDIA GPUs were capable of delivering.

Extreme High Definition (XHD) Gaming

When we first heard of XHD back with the 7900 series of NVIDIA GPU?s it really took two of the 7950 GX2 graphics cards, a total of four GPUs and 2GB of RAM to get XHD resolutions of 2560 x 1600 at playable frame rates on most games. NVIDIA has improved the performance so vastly with the 8800 GTX that you can now take full advantage of XHD gaming with one single 8800 GTX graphics card.

PureVideo & PureVideo HD

Both the 8800 GTX and the 8800 GTS have PureVideo HD capability built into the card. This enables you to play back HD DVD and Blu-ray HD movies with optimal performance. PureVideo HD can deliver 720p, 1080i and 1080p and supports both 3:2 and 2:2 pull down of interlaced HD content. AACS protected Blu-ray and HD DVD movies can be played on PCs using 8800 GPUs using AACS compliant movie players from CyberLink, InterVideo and Nero that use the PureVideo features of the 8800 GTX.

You do have to be using a HDCP compliant display for playback of protected HD movie formats. NVIDIA broke records with the 8800 GPUs on the industry standard HQV Benchmark that evaluates SD video de-interlacing, motion correction, noise reduction, film cadence detection, and detail enhancement. The 8800 series GPUs scored 128 points out if a possible 130 point scale.

Quantum Effects GPU-Based Physics

The single most exciting thing that the new 8800 GTX brings to the table is the ability to perform physics calculation right on the GPU. NVIDIA?s Quantum Effects technology allows the 128 stream processors to deliver gobs of raw floating point computational power that is needed for detailed physic calculations.

This improved physic processing on the GPU means more realistic smoke, fire and explosions as well as greatly improved physics on hair, fur, and water. These effects can be completely rendered on the GPU of the 8800 GTX leaving the CPU of your system less loaded allowing it to concentrate on the game engine. Physics processing on the GPU is one of the best features on the 8800 GTX and the upcoming DX10. You can also connect three 8800 GTX cards with the NVIDIA 680i chipset for the ultimate physics platform.

CUDA

When NVDIA talks about CUDA they don?t mean the sweet 1970 muscle car, they mean Compute Unified Device Architecture. CUDA allows the 8800 GTX to be massively threaded as NVIDIA says. CUDA threads are different than graphics threads, but both can be run at the same time on the 8800 GPU.

Specifications of the NVIDIA XFX GeForce 8800 GTX

The 8800 GTX uses a 90 nm fabrication process and has 681 million transistors. The core clock is 575 MHz and the memory clock is 900 MHz. This is the first NVIDIA graphics card to add a third clock speed to the core and memory clocks we are used to seeing on graphics cards. The third clock speed is the shader clock for the stream processors which is 1350 MHz on the 8800 GTX.

Gone are the days of 256 MB and 512 MB of memory on graphics cards, in an effort to broaden the memory bandwidth NVIDIA?s 8800 GTX has an odd memory amount of 768 MB and has a memory bandwidth of 86.4 GB/s. The number of ROPs for the 8800 GTX is 24 and the frame buffer size is 768 MB. The 8800 GTX has a phenomenal texture fill rate of 36.8 GT/s and the RAMDACs run at 400 MHz. All 8800 GTXs are PCI Express bus technology.

The 8800 GTX requires two 6-pin PCI Express graphics power connectors per card. If you are looking to run SLI with the 8800 GTX, you will need a PSU with four of these connectors. The 8800 GTX will not perform as intended and may not work at all if only one PCI Express 6-pin power connector is connected to the card. One single 8800 GTX requires a minimum 450 W PSU with a 12v current rating of 30A.

Benchmarking the 8800 GTX

You will soon see how absolutely jaw dropping the power of the new 8800 GTX is for gaming in today?s currently available DX9 game titles. For the benchmarking of the 8800 GTX I used several game titles as well at 3DMark06 for some synthetic tests. My test system specifications for the benchmarks are as follows:

• CPU: Intel X6800 Core 2 Extreme liquid cooled
• Mainboard: abit AW9D-Max
• RAM: 2GB Crucial DDR2 PC2-8000
• PSU: OCZ GameXStream 700W
• HDD: 1x 74Gb Raptor, 1x 750 GB Seagate

3DMark06

I ran several three test runs on the 8800 GTX at the default settings of 3DMark06 and took the middle score of the three runs. The results are as follows:

• 3D Marks- 10,355
• SM2.0- 4796
• HDR/SM3- 4870
• CPU- 2288
• Return to Proxycon- 40.217
• Firefly Forrest- 39.721
• Canyon Flight- 46.065
• Deep Freeze- 51.336
• CPU1- 0.733
• CPU2- 1.143

To put these numbers in perspective, I tested the NVIDIA Quad SLI set up (testing was done on a prior test system with a different CPU and board, AMD FX-62 and ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe) not too long ago on an FX-62 based system and the total 3D Marks were 8448.

Battlefield 2142

I used FRAPS to copy minimum, maximum and average frame rates while playing the ?Fall of Berlin? map on BF2142. For the first run I set all the in game graphics options to max, save the AA which was 4x because for some reason the game wouldn?t allow me to turn on 8x AA and a screen resolution of 1600 x 1200. FRAPS recorded the following average frame rate information:

• Minimum- 32 fps
• Maximum- 100 fps
• Average- 85.42 fps.

Using the same map I made a second run with the graphics settings being over ridden by the NVIDIA control panel with the options in the game the same and 16x AF in the NVIDIA control panel. FRAPS recorded the following numbers:

• Minimum- 32 fps
• Maximum 101 fps
• Average- 90.42 fps

Anyway you slice it, the 8800 GTX simply rocks when playing BF2142. This level of detail would take two lesser graphics cards and still not get the frame rates we see here.

FEAR

For testing with FEAR I went in and turned all of the options to high and used a 1920 x 1200 screen resolution and ran through the in game demo loop and recorded the following numbers:

• Minimum Frame Rate- 33 fps
• Average Frame Rate- 67 fps
• Maximum Frame Rate- 157 fps

The averages for the run worked out like this; 0% of the time were frame rates below 25 fps, 10% of the time frame rates were 25-40 fps and a full 90% of the time frame rates were greater than 40 fps. I can barely believe that these numbers are being generated by a single card. My quad SLI machine can?t match this performance.

Oblivion

Oblivion is one of the most spectacular games graphically that you can currently get. This game brings rigs to their knees daily. I was very excited to see how well it would perform on the 8800 GTX. I ran the game at resolution of 1920 x 1200 with all options on and turned to their highest levels. The first run was with 8x AA and bloom turned on. I used FRAPS to gather frame rate information in the same outdoor area covering roughly the same ground. FRAPS recorded the following frame rate data:

• Min- 15 fps
• Max- 63 fps
• Avg- 45.788 fps

With Oblivion being one of the premiere PC game titles currently available I decided to test the NVIDIA control panel settings with the game. I left all setting in the Oblivion options area the same and enabled 16x AA and 16x AF in the NVIDIA control panel and recorded the following frame rates with FRAPS:

• Min- 7 fps
• Max- 64 fps
• Avg- 22.631 fps

As you can probably tell from the numbers above, the game was not playable at these graphics levels. I decided to test a bit more and see if I could get playable frame rates at other NVIDIA control panel settings. What I found was that the best graphics quality I could get and still have playable frame rates was with 1920 x 1200, 16x AF and 8x AA. These settings gave the following frame rate data in FRAPS:

• Min- 9 fps
• Max- 64 fps
• Avg 27.769

Quake 4

The final game benchmark I ran was with Quake 4. I ran through the opening level to the point where you are asked to return and get the team medic. The game was set at ultra detail level, 1920 x 1200, all options and settings as max with 8x AA. FRAPS recorded the following frame rate data:

• Min- 13
• Max- 63
• Avg 43.767

Honestly, I never noticed the dip to 13 fps while playing the game everything seemed very smooth and playable at these settings. For my second Quake 4 run I used the NVIDIA control panel to up the AF to 16x and left the AA at 4x as well as the same resolution as the previous test run. FRAPS recorded the following frame rate data:

• Min- 15 fps
• Max- 63 fps
• Avg- 57.382 fps

Verdict

At the end of the day there is no doubt whatsoever that the NVIDIA XFX 8800 GTX is the baddest graphics card on the planet. This beast out performs not only ATI's X1900 CrossFire, but the single 8800 GTX delivers more performance than NVIDIA?s own 7950 GX2 quad SLI setup. If you want the fastest single graphics card around, don't walk, run to your local retailer and buy one of these beasts. The 8800 GTX offers fantastic performance at a price that is on the high side, but nothing this fast comes cheap. The MSRP for the XFX 8800 GTX is $599.

Test System Specifications:

• CPU: Intel Core 2 Extreme Edition X6800
• RAM: 2GB Crucial PC2-8000
• Chassis: Cooler Master CM Stacker 830 w/ 8 120mm fans
• Mainboard: Abit AW9D-Max
• HDD: 1- 74GB Raptor, 1- 750GB Seagate Barracuda
• Video: ATI X1900 CrossFire