NVIDIA’s G80 GPU has been sitting atop the 3D graphics food chain for well over a year now.  It was way back in November of ’06 that the GeForce 8800 GTX and original 640MB GTS arrived – the first two graphics cards based on the G80 GPU.  Sometime later, the more affordable 320MB GeForce 8800 GTS and current flagship GeForce 8800 Ultra arrived, but these two cards are based on the same GPU that powers NVIDIA’s initial 8800-series offerings.

Obviously, even though NVIDIA’s products still clearly outperform ATI’s at the high-end, it’s time for a refresh, if just to keep things exciting for consumers this holiday season.  The first glimpse of what NVIDIA had in store came a little over a month ago in the form of the GeForce 8800 GT.  The GeForce 8800 GT was based on a brand new GPU, internally codenamed the G92.  G80 and G92 are fundamentally very similar, but in our coverage of the GeForce 8800 GT, we speculated that NVIDIA hadn’t unleashed the full potential of the GPU due to the odd number of stream processor partitions enabled in the GT - seven.  As it turns out we were correct.

Today NVIDIA is launching yet another addition to the GeForce 8800 series, a new GTS card featuring 512MB of frame buffer memory and a G92 at its heart, with get this, 128 stream processors.  There was an eighth stream processor partition lurking within the G92 all along...

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB  Features & Specifications

The new G92-based GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB card’s features and specifications are outlined above.  Keep in mind, however, that these specifications are NVIDIA’s recommendations only.  Most of their board partners will be offering cards clocked significantly higher than NVIDIA’s reference specifications.

As you can see, the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB sports a total of 128 stream processors with a core GPU clock speed of 650MHz and a shader clock of 1625MHz (NVIDIA’s current GPUs have multiple clock domains within the chip, hence the different clock speeds for the core and shaders).  The card’s 512MB of DDR3 memory rides along at 970MHz (1940MHz DDR) utilizing a 256-bit wide interface, which results in a little over 62GB/s of peak bandwidth.

Physically, the cards are 9 inches in length with dual-slot coolers.  Overall board power is roughly 150W max, which means GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB cards require only a single supplemental 6-pin PCI Express power connector.

The GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB’s GPU and memory configuration put the card in an interesting position in relation to NVIDIA’s current GeForce 8800 series offerings.

	GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB	GeForce 8800 GTX	GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB	GeForce 8800 GT 512MB
GPU Core Clock	650MHz	575MHz	500MHz	600MHz
GPU Shader Clock	1625MHz	1350MHz	1200MHz	1500MHz
Memory Clock	970MHz (1940MHz DDR)	900MHz (1800MHz DDR)	800MHz (1600MHz DDR)	900MHz (1800MHz DDR)
Fill Rate	41.6 GT/s	36.8 GT/s	24 GT/s	33.6 GT/s
Memory Bandwidth	62.1GB/s	86.4 GB/s	64 GB/s	57.6 GB/s
Stream Processors	128	128	96	112
Memory Interface	256-bit	384-bit	320-bit	256-bit
Fab Process	65nm	90nm	90nm	65nm
Number of Transistors	754M	681M	681M	754M
Street Price or MSRP	$299 - $349 MSRP	$520 street	$380 street	$199 - $249 MSRP

 
With its clock speeds set to NVIDIA’s reference specifications, the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB’s fill rate ends up being higher than the GeForce 8800 GTX.  Due to its narrower memory bus, however, the GTS 512MB can’t touch the GTX’s theoretical peak memory bandwidth, despite having a clock speed advantage.  And its smaller frame buffer (512MB vs. 768MB) should limit the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB card’s performance relative to the GTX in some situations as well.

But what these numbers do tell us is that the new GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB should theoretically outperform the more expensive 8800 GTX when fillrate and shader processing are the limiting performance factors.

 

 
As has been the case for all of NVIDIA’s product launches over the last couple of years, today’s is a ‘hard launch’ and cards should be available for purchase immediately.  As such, we performed our testing with cards that arrived in full retail trim.

The first GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB we’ll be showing you here is the Asus EN8800GTS TOP.  The Asus EN8800GTS TOP ships in a massive, bright-green colored box adorned with an Asian warrior princess chick.  Included with the card itself are a couple of DVDs that contain the necessary drivers to get the card up and running, and a number of proprietary Asus applications like GamerOSD and SmartDoctor.  There was also a leather DVD case included in the box, along with a DVI-to-VGA adapter, a dual Molex-to-6-Pin PCI Express power adapter, and a video component output dongle.  Sorry folks, no cutting-edge games to be found.

     

     
The Asus EN8800GTS TOP

The Asus EN8800GTS TOP card itself doesn’t differ from NVIDIA’s reference design in any major way.  It has the same dual-slot cooler, PCB and the same dual dual-link DVI outputs, video output, and single SLI connector.  Where the Asus EN8800GTS TOP does differ from NVIDIA’s reference design, however, is in regard to frequencies. This card actually runs at a 740MHz GPU core clock with 1035MHz memory.  Those are significant increases to NVIDIA’s recommended 650MHz / 970MHz.  We should probably mention that the decals affixed to the fan shroud and fan barrel are different than NVIDIA’s too; go figure.  Expect street prices for the Asus EN8800GTS TOP to fall somewhere in between $375 - $400, with a non-"TOP", lower clocked version to arrive at a somewhat lower price point.

Next up we have XFX’s GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB Alpha Dog Edition.  In stark contrast to Asus’ gigantic brightly-colored packaging, XFX’s offering ships in a relatively small box, about the size of a typical shoe box, that’s mostly black with green accents.

The XFX GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB Alpha Dog Edition’s bundle too is quite different than the Asus card.  Included with the XFX GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB Alpha Dog Edition we found your typical assortment of manuals and documentation, an S-Video cable, a DVI-to-VGA adapter, a driver disc, and a thankfully another disc that contained a full version of the DX10 game Lost Planet: Extreme Condition.  Lost Planet hasn’t won any game of the year awards, but it is a great title to show-off the capabilities of the card nonetheless.

The final addition to the XFX GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB Alpha Dog Edition’s bundle was a slick "I’m Gaming – Do Not Disturb" placard.  Needless to say, this little addition made it immediately onto the door to BW Labs 3.0, much to the dismay of the Mrs.

      

     
The XFX GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB Alpha Dog Edition - Sans Justin Timberlake

Physically, the XFX GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB Alpha Dog Edition is identical to NVIDIA’s reference design, save for the custom XFX decals on the card’s fan shroud and fan barrel.  Like the Asus EN8800GTS TOP though, the XFX GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB Alpha Dog Edition is overclocked right out of the box.  XFX configures this card with a 678MHz core clock speed and a 986MHz memory clock.  A non-Alpha Dog reference clocked version is planned as well.  The Alpha Dog carries an MSRP of $379, while the reference clocked version's MSRP is set for $349.

HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEMS: We tested all of the graphics cards used in this article on either an EVGA nForce 680i SLI motherboard (NVIDIA GPUs) or an Asus P5E3 Deluxe (ATI GPUs) powered by a Core 2 Extreme QX6850 quad-core processor and 2GB of low-latency Corsair RAM. The first thing we did when configuring the test systems was enter their respective BIOSes and set all values to their "optimized" or "performance" default settings. Then we manually configured the memory timings and disabled any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use. The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows Vista Ultimate was installed. When the installation was complete we fully updated the OS, and installed the latest DX10 redist and various hotfixes along with the necessary drivers and applications.

The HotHardware Test System Core 2 Extreme Powered

Processor - Motherboard - Video Cards - Memory - Audio - Hard Drive -

Hardware Used: Core 2 Extreme QX6850 (3GHz)  EVGA nForce 680i SLI nForce 680i SLI chipset Asus P5E3 Deluxe X38 Express  GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB (2) GeForce 8800 GTX (2) GeForce 8800 GT (2) GeForce 8800 GTS (2) GeForce 8600 GTS (2) Radeon HD 3870 (2) Radeon HD 3850 (2) Radeon HD 2900 XT (2) Radeon HD 2600 XT (2) 2048MB Corsair PC2-6400C3 2 X 1GB 2048MB Corsair DDR3-1333 C7 2 X 1GB Integrated on board Western Digital "Raptor" 74GB - 10,000RPM - SATA

OS -  DirectX - Video Drivers - Synthetic (DX) - DirectX - DirectX - DirectX - DirectX - OpenGL -

Relevant Software: Windows Vista Ultimate DirectX 10 NVIDIA Forceware v169.09 ATI Catalyst BETA v8.43 Benchmarks Used: 3DMark06 v1.0.2 Company of Heros - DX10 Crysis - DX10 Half Life 2: Episode 2* Enemy Territory: Quake Wars* * - Custom Test (HH Exclusive demo)

Performance Comparisons with 3DMark06 v1.0.2 Details: www.futuremark.com/products/3dmark06

3DMark06

3DMark06 is the most recent addition to the 3DMark franchise. This version differs from 3Dmark05 in a number of ways, and includes not only Shader Model 2.0 tests, but Shader Model 3.0 and HDR tests as well. Some of the assets from 3DMark05 have been re-used, but the scenes are now rendered with much more geometric detail and the shader complexity is vastly increased as well. Max shader length in 3DMark05 was 96 instructions, while 3DMark06 ups that number to 512. 3DMark06 also employs much more lighting and there is extensive use of soft shadows. With 3DMark06, Futuremark has also updated how the final score is tabulated. In this latest version of the benchmark, SM 2.0 and HDR / SM3.0 tests are weighted and the CPU score is factored into the final tally as well.

We've broken up our benchmark results in this article into two sets of graphs - one with all of the single-GPU configurations and the other with all of the multi-GPU SLI and CrossFire configrations.

As you can see in the results above, according to 3DMark06, the new Asus and XFX GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB cards clock in with the highest scores of the bunch, besting even the mighty GeForce 8800 GTX.  Performance in these tests are determined more by fillrate and shader performance, than memory bandwidth, hence the 8800 GTS 512MB's ability to outpace the GTX here.  Dual-GPU configurations are next...
 

The performance trend remains largely unchanged when running the cards in a dual-GPU configuration.  Please note, however, that we linked the Asus EN8800GTS TOP and XFX GeForce 8800 GTS Alpha Dog together to run in SLI mode, hence the single result for the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB SLI in the graphs above and on the proceeding pages.

Performance Comparisons with Half-Life 2: Episode 2 Details: www.half-life2.com

Half Life 2: Episode 2

Thanks to the dedication of hardcore PC gamers and a huge mod-community, the original Half-Life became one of the most successful first person shooters of all time.  And thanks to an updated game engine, gorgeous visual, and intelligent weapon and level design, Half Life 2 became just as popular.  Episode 2 offers a number of visual enhancements including better looking transparent texture anti-aliasing. These tests were run at resolutions of 1,280 x 1,024, 1,600 x 1,200 and 1,920 x 1,200 with 4X anti-aliasing and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently.  Color correction and HDR rendering were also enabled in the game engine as well.  We used a custom recorded timedemo file to benchmark all cards in this test.

In single card mode, the new GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB cards from Asus and XFX both manage to edge out the GeForce 8800 GTX by a few frames per second at all resolution, which is to say they were teh best performers in this test.

The same holds true for the multi-GPU SLI tests.  With two GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB cards linked together in SLI mode, they once again outperformed even a pair of GeForce 8800 GTX cards.  This goes to show that Half Lfe 2: Episode 2's performance, at least with the settings we used, is also dependant on shader performance and fillrate.

Performance Comparisons with Company of Heroes Details: www.companyofheroesgame.com

Company of Heroes

Relic Entertainment's World War II era real-time strategy game Company of Heroes was originally released as a DirectX 9 title for Windows.  But recent upates to the game have incorporated support for new DirectX 10 features that improve image quality and enhance the game's finer graphical details.  The game features a built-in performance test which which we used to attain the results below. Our Company of Heroes tests were run at resolutions of 1,280 x 1,024, 1,600 x 1,200 and 1920 x 1200 with 4X anti-aliasing and all of the game's image-quality related options set to their maximum values.

The DirectX 10 Company of Heroes benchmark put the new XFX GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB Alpha Dog Edition and Asus EN8800GTS TOP somewhere in between the original GTX and the relatively new GeForce 8800 GT while running in a single card configuration, the scores are right up there with the GTX though. 

Unfortunately, we ran into an issue with the Company of Heroes SLI testing with the 8800 GTS 512MB cards.  It seemed that anti-aliasing was not working despite multiple attempts to enable it via the game's control panel and NVIDIA's Forceware drivers.

Performance Comparisons with ET: Quake Wars Details: www.enemyterritory.com

Enemy Territory:  Quake Wars

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is Based on id's radically enhanced Doom 3 engine and viewed by many as Battlefield 2 meets the Strogg, and then some.  In fact, we'd venture to say that id took EA's team-based warfare genre up a notch or two.  ET: Quake Wars also marks the introduction of John Carmack's "Megatexture" technology that employs extremely large environment and terrain textures that cover vast areas of maps without the need to repeat and tile many small textures.  The beauty of megatexture technology is that each unit only takes up a maximum of 8MB of frame buffer memory.  Add to that HDR-like bloom lighting and leading edge shadowing effects and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars looks great, plays well and works high end graphics cards vigorously.  The game was tested with all of its in-game options set to their maximum values with soft particles enabled in addition to 4X anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering.

When running in single-card configurations, the new GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB cards' performance was right in-line with the GeForce 8800 GTX and new GeForce 8800 GT.  The original 640MB GTS, however, trailed behind the newer cards by about 10% to 15%.

The same held true while running the cards in an SLI configuration, where the 8800 GTS 512MB cards were actually about to outpace the 8800 GTS SLI setup at the lower resolution, only to fall a bit behind once the resolution was increased.

Performance Comparisons with Crysis Details: www.ea.com/crysis

Crysis

If you're at all into enthusiast computing, the highly anticipated single player demo of the hot, new, upcoming FPS smash-hit Crysis, should require no introduction. Crytek's game engine visuals are easily the most impressive real-time 3D renderings we've seen on the computer screen to date.  The engine employs some of the latest techniques in 3D rendering like Parallax Occlusion Mapping, Subsurface Scattering, Motion Blur and Depth-of-Field effects, as well as some of the most impressive use of Shader technology we've seen yet.  In short, for those of you that want to skip the technical jib-jab, Crysis is HOT.  We ran the SP demo with all of the game's visual options set to 'High' to put a significant load on the graphics cards being tested.

The new GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB cards perform right in-line in the Crysis GPU benchmark.  At all resolutions, the 8800 GTS 512MB cards were a bit faster than the recently released GeForce 8800 GT and slightly slower than the mighty GeForce 8800 GTX.

Running a pair of GeForce 8800 GTS cards in SLI-mode resulted in scores slightly higher than a pair of GTX cards at the lower resolutions where memory bandwidth and frame buffer size play less of role in performance.  But once the resolution is increased, the GTX cards once again regained the top spot.

Before we concluded our testing, we also spent some time overclocking the new GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB cards using the GPU core and memory clock frequency sliders available withing NVIDIA's Forceware drivers when nTune is installed.  We found that both the XFX and Asus cards overclocked to similar levels, so we've included only one overclocked result here.  And please keep in mind, your mileage may vary.

Overclocking the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB Gotta Love 'Free' Performance

 
To find the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB card's peak core and memory frequencies, we slowly raised their respective sliders until we begun to see visual artifacts on-screen while running a game or benchmark, or until our test system was no longer stable.  In this particular case, we never saw any artifacts, but the test system would freeze almost immediately after launching a game.

 
GeForce 8800 GTS Overclock - GPU=802MHz, Memory=1104MHz (2.2GHz DDR)



  
GeForce 8800 GTS Overclock - GPU=802MHz, Memory=1104MHz (2.2GHz DDR)

Before we bring this article to a close, we'd like to cover a few final data points. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter and also took some notes regarding its noise output. Our goal was to give you all an idea as to how much power each configuration used and to explain how loud the configurations were under load. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the video cards alone.
  

Total System Power Consumption & Acoustics It's All About the Watts and Decibels

Considering its performance throughout testing, the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB card's power consumption fell right in line with expectations.  While idle and under load, its power consumption fell right in between the GeForce 8800 GT and the GeForce 8800 GTX.  In comparison to the relatively new Radeon 3800 series cards, the 65nm 8800 GTS 512MB's power consumption is considerably higher, but then again so is its performance most of the time.

In regard to the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB card's acoustic profile, we can say that these new cards are very quiet during normal operation.  Like most modern video cards, the cooler's fan speed is dynamically controller and at the highest speed it generates a fair amount of noise.  Howefer, during testing, even while overclocked, the fan never kicked up to its highest speed.