http://dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=4441

DailyTech' s hands-on with the GeForce 8800 series continues with more information about the GPU and the retail boards. The new NVIDIA graphics architecture will be fully compatible with Microsoft’s upcoming DirectX 10 API with support for shader model 4.0, and represents the company' s 8th generation GPU in the GeForce family.

NVIDIA has code-named G80 based products as the GeForce 8800 series. While the 7900 and 7800 series launched with GT and GTX suffixes, G80 will do away with the GT suffix. Instead, NVIDIA has revived the GTS suffix for its second fastest graphics product—a suffix that hasn’t been used since the GeForce 2 days.

NVIDIA’s GeForce 8800GTX will be the flagship product. The core clock will be factory clocked at 575 MHz. All GeForce 8800GTX cards will be equipped with 768MB of GDDR3 memory, to be clocked at 900 MHz. The GeForce 8800GTX will also have a 384-bit memory interface and deliver 86GB/second of memory bandwidth. GeForce 8800GTX graphics cards are equipped with 128 unified shaders clocked at 1350 MHz. The theoretical texture fill-rate is around 38.4 billion pixels per second.

Slotted right below the GeForce 8800GTX is the slightly cut-down GeForce 8800GTS. These graphics cards will have a G80 GPU clocked at a slower 500 MHz. The memory configuration for GeForce 8800GTS cards slightly differ from the GeForce 8800GTX. GeForce 8800GTS cards will be equipped with 640MB of GDDR3 graphics memory clocked at 900 MHz. The memory interface is reduced to 320-bit and overall memory bandwidth is 64GB/second. There will be fewer unified shaders with GeForce 8800GTS graphics cards. 96 unified shaders clocked at 1200 MHz are available on GeForce 8800GTS graphics cards.

Additionally GeForce 8800GTX and 8800GTS products are HDCP compliant with support for dual dual-link DVI, VIVO and HDTV outputs. All cards will have dual-slot coolers too. Expect GeForce 8800GTX and 8800GTS products to launch the second week of November 2006. This will be a hard launch as most manufacturers should have boards ready now.

Nvidia have been very tight lipped about the development of the G80, and there were many odd rumours floating around in the past months. Now some real facts are coming through and in many respects Nvidia have exceeded expectations (going by specs). Memory sizes are certainly odd, but from what I' ve read, the reason is because they needed more memory bandwidth. A 256bit memory interface was limiting, but a 512bit memory interface would be too expensive. So they' ve opted for a 384bit memory interface, which leads to the 768MB/640MB memory sizes.

eg:
768MB RAM = Six 64bit (384bits total) channels, each addressing 128MB of RAM.

There will be more information to come, and a couple of other features are explored in these articles:

http://dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=4442
http://dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=4450
http://dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=4444

So for the less technically literate, what does this all mean? Nvidia' s new graphics card is one powerful mothertrucker! Imagine two of these beasts running in SLI?