It was only a short while ago when NVIDIA announced the arrival of their first G92 card, otherwise known as the 8800GT. As the final quarter of the year almost ended, NVIDIA surprised us with another new card yet again, called the 8800GTS. But wait a minute, isn’t that the same card that came out early this year? The name, yes. The core, nope. Read on.
The newly released 8800GTS is based not on the G80 core, but the 65nm G92 core instead. This is the second addition to the G92 lineup after the 8800GT. The only way to differentiate it from the G80 one is that it sports 512MB instead of 320MB or 640MB. Now the 8800GTS contains the same features of the G92 core present in the 8800GT. However, there are a few notable key points that you should be aware of. The 8800GTS has the same number of shader processors as the GTX and Ultra versions, but its shader clock and core clock runs much faster; 1,625MHz and 650MHz respectively. The downside is that it’s designed on a 256-bit architecture rather than 384-bit, which the GTX and Ultra were based on. Hence, it has less memory bandwidth than the duo. Judging from the 8800GTS’s specs, its performance should theoretically be at par with the GTX and Ultra.
NVIDIA went back to the dual-slot design, which means a bigger fan and larger heatsink. Thankfully, the card was quite soft to our surprise, though the air blown out was rather hot. Unlike the Ultra, we saw only one PCIe power connector, and that’s a good thing considering the 8800GTS is supposed to be as powerful. Recently, NVIDIA made a big hoo-ha about its 3-way SLI configuration supported by the latest 780i nForce chipset. It comes as a major disappointment that both the 8800GT and 8800GTS only has one SLI bridge connection. So at most, only two of these can be run simultaneously.
We like to reiterate that we’ve switched from Windows XP to Windows Vista, in order to enable DX10 graphics on Crysis and World in Conflict. While we can see that the card does extremely well on 3DMark, we can’t say for sure if it is capable of handling the latest graphic-intensive games. With settings set to high quality and AA and AF on, Crysis was playable, though it jerked once in awhile. WIC did manage better as frame rates above 30 fps is considered safe.
From our list of scores, the 8800GTS surpasses the GTX but not the Ultra; higher memory bandwidth still wins at higher resolutions. But needless to say, the card is a powerhouse. However, after checking the latest pricelist, we found out that the 8800GT’s pricing is around US$230 only. With that much of a difference in pricing, and the fact that the performance-gap between it and the 8800GTS is small, one can’t help but wonder if the 8800GTS 512MB edition is worth considering.
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