Inno3D GeForce 9800 GT Twin Turbo review - 2 - GeForce 9800 GT Specifications & Technology

GeForce 9800 GT Specifications & Technology

So, what we are looking at today is the 9800 GT, well actually it is a 8800 GT. A card with typically nice slim single slot design. The silicon powering this card is based on NVIDIA's 65nm process, though some models are claimed to have moved to a 55nm chip already and these chips have one more advantage, the ability for Hybrid Power.

But is the product physically different from the 8800 GT you ask? Ehm nope. Let's pull a register dump from the card:

$ffffffffff Display adapter information
$ffffffffff ----------------------------------------------------------------
$0000000000 Description : NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT
$0000000001 Vendor ID : 10de (NVIDIA)
$0000000002 Device ID : 0605
$0000000003 Location : bus 1, device 0, function 0
$0000000004 Bus type : PCIE
$000000000f PCIE link width : 16x supported, 16x selected
$0000000009 Base address 0 : cc000000 (memory range)
$000000000a Base address 1 : b0000000 (memory range)
$000000000b Base address 2 : none
$000000000c Base address 3 : ca000000 (memory range)
$000000000d Base address 4 : none
$000000000e Base address 5 : 00009c00 (I/O range)
$ffffffffff ----------------------------------------------------------------
$ffffffffff NVIDIA specific display adapter information
$ffffffffff ----------------------------------------------------------------
$0100000000 Graphics core : G92 revision A2 (112sp)
$0100000001 Hardwired ID : 0600 (ROM strapped to 0605)
$0100000002 Memory bus : 256-bit
$0100000003 Memory type : DDR3 (RAM configuration 00)
$0100000004 Memory amount : 524288KB
$0100000100 Core clock domain 0 : 702.000MHz
$0100000101 Core clock domain 1 : 1512.000MHz
$0100000006 Memory clock : 999.000MHz (1998.000MHz effective)
$0100000007 Reference clock : 27.000MHz

As you can see, well... let me tell you, other than the clock frequencies changed by Inno3D, there's nothing different between the 8800 GT and 9800 GT. So is this a respin product you ask? Yes! What's so interesting about this 9800 GT SKU is the amount of shader processors on this product, these little sub-cores offer bang for bucks. See, an older 8800 GTX has 128 of these shader processors, yet the 8800/9800 GT has 112 activated shader processors.

Interesting, because if you take a peek at the clock speeds you might even think it can beat a GTX. Well, at the end of the pipeline there are these things called ROPs and that's where the GT (16 ROPs) is a little castrated over the GTX (24 ROPs). There's a new optimization of the ROPs' compression algorithm being applied on the GT though.

Next to that, this product is utilizing enough memory, yet the GTX is addressing the memory bus faster (384-bit) opposed to the 8800 GT with 256-bit. The performance differential is small though, as our benchmarks will show. Further geek stuff, theoretical fillrate 42.000 MPixels, 57.6 GB/sec memory bandwidth.

So since we gently, yet firmly, touched on the topic of memory, these cards without a doubt will be available in both a 256 and 512MB versions. This, however, is the 512MB release.

The memory clocks (reference) will be 900 MHz (x2), the core frequency (reference) 600 MHz and for the freaks, the shader domain is clocked at 1500 MHz.

Media playback wise this GPU has the new VP2 (Video Processor 2) core embedded into the silicon. This means great Purevideo HD support in both acceleration of media files, yet also post-processing and enhancing them. Despite the new VP2, the unit hasn't evolved and still doesn't fully accelerate VC-1, no real big deal to be honest. HDMI support is also integrated on the chip. Also worth mentioning is that the 8800 GT is fully PCI-Express 2.0 compliant. Not at all important though as 16GB/sec bandwidth over PCI-Expess 2.0 is not something this card will even remotely use, ever.

Due to the new VP2 embedded core, optimizations to the transistor count has risen a little, 754 Million transistors.