In the GPU business, like any other semiconductor technology, die size, cost and performance per watt are the name of the game. Performance per watt from a design and manufacturing perspective is important on multiple levels. Certainly, power efficient products are important to the consumer but also, generally speaking, power efficient designs usually mean higher clock speed head room and higher yields which, at the end of the day, drop right to bottom line profits. In terms of very complex, highly scalable processor architectures like CPU's and GPU's, bleeding-edge manufacturing processes are critical to delivering a competitive product with reasonable cost targets. - HotHardware

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB Video Board Review

Today's GeForce 8800 GT launch is an example of what it takes to bring a highly complex processor architecture to fruition in today's competitive arena. The new GeForce 8800 GT is an entirely new GPU core, well sort of. The NVIDIA G92 GPU core that is under the hood of the new GeForce 8800 GT is essentially a die-shrink and cut back of the last NVIDIA's G80 architecture, with a few enhancements and optimizations. With this migration to 65nm process technology, the new GeForce 8800 GT is targeted at offering solid mid-range performance, lower power consumption and heat, along with a competitive price.

A quick take on the specifications show this GPU has a few more transistors going for it at 754 million, versus other members of the G80 architecture weighing in at 681 million. This is because NVDIA has enhanced a few key functional blocks within the GPU engine, which we will get into detail on shortly. In addition, obviously a 65nm fab process has been kind to the GPU, affording the ability to scale to a robust 600MHz core clock and a 1500MHz shader clock. Comparatively, a GeForce 8800 GTX GPU runs at 575MHz core and 1350MHz shader clock, but having more stream processors available.

With any new GPU architecture, especially one built on a new, leading-edge 65nm manufacturing process, we'll always try to push the envelope a bit in an effort to see just how much head room the card has above and beyond factory specifications. Ultimately we managed to crank up our GeForce 8800 GT reference card to a blistering 720MHz core speed and a full 2000MHz memory interface speed. Virtually across the board NVIDIA's new GeForce 8800 GT is as fast or faster than a GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB card and significantly faster than a Radeon 2900 XT, save for a couple of multi-GPU enabled systems.

In terms of HD digital video processing and image quality, the GeForce 8800 GT, with its second generation PureVideo HD engine, is roughly on par with AMD's HD Avivo solution currently. NVIDIA's second foray into 65nm GPU technology is a resounding sucess in our humble opinion. And how could anyone argue a graphics product that consumes less power, costs less and performs better than the previous genertion? The proverbial hat-trick of high electronics is what we're looking at when we consider all of the performance metrics we showed you today against the backdrop of price.

Beyond that, for a reasonable investment, you get a product that will run just about any game engine at high resolution with support for DirectX 10 and HD digital video processing offload. In fact, for less than the cost of a single GeForce 8800 GTX, you could buy two of these cards and run them in SLI for even better performance. We'll have to see how this all unfolds in the weeks ahead, but for today, its all NVIDIA limelight shining down on the new cost and power efficient GeForce 8800 GT graphics card.