EVGA e-GeForce 9600GT SSC Edition Review :: EVGA e-GeForce 9600GT SSC Edition Features

• DirectX 10
• Pixel Shader 4.0
• Vertex Shader 4.0
• 65 nanometer low-k TSMC process
• G94 chip
• 505 million transistors
• 64 Unified Shaders
• 740MHz core clock
• 1950MHz DDR3 memory
• 1835MHz Shader Clock
• 14 texture units
• 256-bit memory bus
• 512MB memory
• $195 MSRP
• Dual Stream Decode
• Dynamic Contrast Enhancement
• PCI Express 2.0
• 16x Coverage Sample Anti-Aliasing
• 16x AF
• 16XQ AA
• Transparency Anti-Aliasing

The GeForce 9600GT is based upon NVIDIA's new G94 chip which is based upon TSMC's 65 nanometer process. The G9x series is very similar in most respects to the G8x series that preceded it. The G94 has a die size of 240mm2, meaning that the die is 25% smaller than the G92 (320mm2) which formed the basis for the GeForce 8800GT card that was released late last year. The chip has 505 million transistors meaning that it has 28% less transistors than the 8800GT (G92) and over 180 million transistors than the 7800GTX NVIDIA's last generation card.

Here's a chart of the various cards in this price range with the specifications of the cards

	GeForce 9600 GT	GeForce 8800 GT	Radeon HD 3870	Radeon HD 3850
Price	220	~$220-270	~$250	$170-190
Core Clock	740MHz	600MHz	775MHz	670MHz
Stream Processor Clock	1.675	1.5GHz	775MHz	670MHz
Memory Clock	1.950	1.8GHz DDR	2.25GHz DDR	1.66GHz DDR
Stream Processors	64	112	320	320
Frame Buffer	512MB	256MB or 512MB	512MB	256MB or 512MB
Memory Interface	256 bits	256 bits	256 bits	256 bits
Memory Bandwidth	62.4GB/sec	57.6GB/sec	72GB/sec	53.12GB/sec
Render back end (ROPs)	16	16	16	16

Key features of the 9600GT card include support for Microsoft's DirectX 10. With the proliferation of games on the market being designed for Shader Model 4 cards, the need for Shader Model 4.1 (ala ATI 3xxx and S3 cards) is not there as of yet. All earlier cards based upon NVIDIA's G8x and ATI's 2xxx series support Shader Model 4 only, meaning that the vast majority of video cards on the market are SM 4.0.

DirectX 10 was introduced with Microsoft's Vista Operating System. Key features of DX10 include support for Geometry Shading, unified Shaders being fully supported, unlimited executed instructions, bitwise operators native integers, 128 texture samplers for the vertex Shaders, and higher number of constant registers and temp registers. DirectX 10 games on the market include Hellgate London, Crysis, Gears of War, Lost Planet Extreme Condition and many more in the pipeline.

EVGA decided to clock their new card the SSC Edition at a core clock of 740MHz, which is 90MHz higher than the core clock of NVIDIA's reference speed. There are 16 ROPs (Outputted Pixels) 32 texture units on the 9600GT meaning that the fill rate of the card is 11.84 Gigapixels a second and texture fillrate is 23.68 Gigatexels a second. In comparison to the 8600GT, there were 8 ROPs and 16 texture units but a much lower clock speed of 540MHz, meaning that the fillrate was 4.32 Gigapixels and 8.64 Gigatexels. GPU-Z a tool we use for graphics cards.

Memory bandwidth on the 9600GT is on a 256-bit memory bus with a clock speed of 975MHz (1950MHz effective). This provides a memory bandwidth of 62.4GB/second. The 8600GT had a 128-bit memory bus with memory bandwidth of approximately 22.4GB/second. The combination of a higher Texel rate and a higher memory bandwidth along with the modifications to the 8xxx core should make the 9600GT quite a performer.

A new feature of the 9600GT is the ability to accelerate the decoding of two video streams simultaneously. NVIDIA calls this feature Dual-Stream Decode. This allows the user to watch a movie and the director commentary at the same time as an example of this feature. PureVideo, NVIDIA's video acceleration feature, was broken in the early revisions of the 8800 series. Dynamic Contrast changes the contrast in a video if the driver determines that a frame of video has poor contrast in comparison to the other frames. Dynamic Color Enhancement can adjust the red, green and blue tones in a picture to provide sharper colors without over-saturation.