The time for the GeForce 8800 GT is drawing near. The card will launch at the end of October, just in time for all those lovely games of November. The GPU itself has 128 super scalar shader units inside, and there have not been many changes over improving the efficiency of the design. The GeForce 8800 GT will come to market with 112 units, disabling 16 units in order to get the yields as high as possible, similar to Cell CPU and its six or seven SPE out of eight ones actually manufactured in silicon. This will probably continue with some future appearances of lower models, like the GeForce 8800 GS with an equal or lesser number of shader units. - The Inquirer

NVIDIA's G92 Chip is Nothing More Than G80 in 65nm

This is identical to the original G80, which had 128 units, and those chips that did not make the cut came to market as GeForce 8800 GTS, the 320MB or 640MB. Now, NVIDIA is getting ready to minimize the remaining G80 inventory with re-launch of some GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB, sporting 112 units, equal to the upcoming GeForce 8800 GT. The chip itself is manufactured in both TSMC and UMC, with UMC order ranging around a million chips, depending on yield in hand. NVIDIA is hoping to sell anywhere between two and three million chips as soon as possible, which is a hefty number for this part.

Then again, with Unreal Tournament 3 and Crysis, a new cycle will begin so there is plenty of market interest. Depending on partner, NVIDIA is pricing the G92 chip at around the $100 mark. This means partners will have a margin in the form of lowly single digit number. The first 20,000 or so boards are reserved for a magical $199 mark, for which you will be able to buy a G92 combined with 256MB of GDDR3 memory. For a few dollars more, 512MB GDDR4 memory will be your pick. NVIDIA is not officially supporting a third SKU, the 1GB card but we learned that this would be a possibility.

These premium SKU's will probably go for between $299 and $349. This higher price will be reflected in performance, which is bound to exceed expectations. You might ponder the question of performance, and it is a good one. As far as we have heard, there will be SKU's on the market with 256MB, 512MB and 1024MB of video memory, 256MB one will be locked by the lack of physical memory, 512MB will prove sufficient if you don't go overboard with resolution, 1GB will buy you peace of mind. And, we're talking about performance in upcoming titles. If you see a GeForce 8800 GT with 1GB of memory, be ready to jump on it.