XFX 8800GS Alpha Dog Edition 384MB Review :: XFX GeForce 8800GS Features

• 384MBmemory
• 192-bit memory bus
• 1.6GHz memory speed
• 1.7GHz Shader Clock
• 96 Stream Processors
• 680MHz Core Clock

The 8800GS is an interesting video card from the looks of it. While most video cards have a 128-bit or 256-bit memory bus, the 8800GS has a 192-bit memory bus, much like the 8800GTS 320MB cards had when the 8800GTX was first launched. The 8800GS has 192MB of DDR3 memory which makes it a rather odd beast, much like the 8800GTX with 768MB. NVIDIA outfitted the 8800GS with three 64-bit memory controllers which makes the 192-bit memory bus.

The 8800GS Alpha Dog Edition has a Shader Clock of 1.7GHz, which is similar in speed to the 9800GTX shader clock of 1.688MHz. NVIDIA did separate Shader Clocks for each 8xxx and above series card, allowing the shaders to operate at a higher clock and perform more operations than if they were limited to the 680MHz of the Core clock.

The core clock of the XFX 8800GS Alpha Dog Edition card is 680MHz, which is a big jump from the core of the reference clock of 580MHz found on the NVIDIA reference 8800GS cards. The overclock is pretty hefty. 8800GS cards have 12 Render Outputted Pixels (ROPs) a second per clock compared to 16 for the 9600GT and 32 for the 9800 series.

The 8800GS has 96 Streaming Processors which correspond to the 96 found on the first 8800GTS 640MB cards that were released in 2004. This is an interesting number, as we’ve seen 64 SPs (9600GT), 96 SPs (8800GTS 640MB and 320MB, 8800GS), 112 SPs (8800GT) and 128 SPs (8800GTS 512MB, 8800GTX, 8800 Ultra, 9800GTX, 9800GX2 (actually 128x2). As you can see, NVIDIA has built quite a bit of granularity into the 8xxx series with all of those chips.

DirectX 10 games have hit in full force, with virtually every game released today having some sort of DirectX 10 features. Microsoft has released DirectX 10 only to the users who purchased Vista, but as every computer sold on the market today has Vista on it this is not much of an issue, except for those that have XP and don’t want to upgrade.

The key features of DirectX 10 include Pixel Shader 4.0, Vertex Shader 4.0, Geometry Shaders, Unified Shaders and the ability to do 128-bit Floating Point precision on all math and pixels in the programs. ATI and S3 have moved on to DirectX 10.1, but that is mostly a minor update to the Shader Models with improved anti-aliasing and a few features designed to increase the use of Global Illumination in games being the main differences.