Hardware Reviews / VGAs / Twintech GeForce 8800GTX Review (Introduction)

Introduction

In my effort to find a prologue for this article on the GeForce 8800GTX review, I decided to comment on what I think is the most characteristic impression that was left to me, after having an experience with this particular lineup. If you all wonder what that is, then I can say with certainty that this is the obvious and if I can say “phenomenal” performance leap over the last generation ( other things equal ). Honestly, when I first plugged my GeForce 8800GTX in my PC, a week after its launch, I was expecting something really big ( as it was reported in some preliminary benchmarks ), but the first experience with this product, left me amazed or astonished to say the least. I am trying to recall a period where this performance leap was observed, and all that comes to my mind is the launch of the ATi Radeon 9700Pro, back in the beginning of the D3D9 ( DirectX 9 ) era.

But let’s take this story step by step. It was not a long time ago ( sometime in the 2006 ) when the rumors and even comments from the nVIDIA team, suggested that the G80 lineup would not follow the “complete” route of unified technology to debut their first D3D10 ( DirectX 10 ) lineup. nVIDIA staff have stated in various occasions, that the unified architectural route was not the viable way to go for the time being performance and efficiency wise, in contrast with ATI that made clearly obvious that they favor this route. Thus everyone was expecting a non unified architecture for the G80 (or GeForce 8 series if you prefer). Some of us speculated that probably nVIDIA, will try and unify the product only at the Vertex/Geometry level and possibly leave the pixel side to dedicated shaders. That coupled with an increase in TMUs ( Texture Mapping Units ) and ALUs ( Arithmetic Logic Units ) was probably the viable and more efficient way to go according to their beliefs. You can all easily understand our surprise when we eventually found out that this was not the final case with their debut DirectX 10 lineup. And quite frankly I thank God for that, since their decision proved more than wise.
Enough with the preliminary talk, let’s cut to the chase...