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 a nice, slim, single slot design. The silicon powering this card is based on NVIDIA's 65nm process, though more recent 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 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 : 1048576KB

As you can see, well... let me tell you, other than a slight clock frequency change by Galaxy, 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 a significant bang for the buck. 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.

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 9800 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.