A year is a long time in the world of consumer 3D graphics, and the fact that NVIDIA's G80 architecture has remained as top dog for a year since its release speaks volumes about the capabilities of the core. The codename of this new GPU is G92, and it makes its first appearance in retail under the GeForce 8800 GT moniker. So, what does this mean for the DirectX 10 graphics board market? Will it tempt those who have been biding their time before making the leap to a current generation graphics card? Will it be a worthy upgrade for existing GeForce 8800 series owners? We investigate all this and more, and take a look at the Extreme N8800 GT graphics card from ASUS. - Elite Bastards

ASUS Extreme N8800 GT 512MB Video Board Review

Despite the rather large change in codename between G80 and G92, you've probably gathered by now that this new GPU from NVIDIA is more about evolution than revolution. No doubt there was a certain feeling of it ain't broke, don't fix it in the NVIDIA camp, and to be honest, who can blame them given the success of the GeForce 8800 series so far? For starters, the G92 finds itself using the 65 nanometre manufacturing process, a definite shrink from the 90 nanometre process used by the G80. This brings with it all of the usual benefits of a die shrink, such as improved power consumption and heat output.

At this moment in time, its equally difficult to find many down sides to our first look at a G92 based part. NVIDIA have taken the same base architecture that has already proved so succesful in the G80, given it a manufacturing process shrink, and used much of those die space savings to raise clock speeds and pack in much improved video playback support via their VP2 engine while also tweaking the abilities of the core's texturing units. If that wasn't enough, the GeForce 8800 GT also sees an additional cluster of stream processors enabled over the GeForce 8800 GTS graphics accelerator.

On another note, the reduction in the G92's memory bus has also, at times, reduced its potential potency compared to the G80. In particular, extremely high resolutions with anti-aliasing enabled in certain titles see the GeForce 8800 GT lose much of its performance advantage over the GTS due to pressures on memory bandwidth. Having said that however, this really didn't affect our testing at any truly playable in-game resolutions for this level of board, so the vast majority of users will never be worried by this potential issue. The fact that turns the GeForce 8800 GT from decent performer to killer graphics board is its price.