Nvidia 8600GTS

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Nvidia 8600GTS

Sudeep Naik, Apr 18, 2007 1726 hrs IST

Everyone's been talking about the successor to the 7600GT, thats exactly what we have here.

Single Slot, Good Performance, DX10 support.

Performance in certain games could have been better (waiting for newer drivers), Slightly expensive.

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The GeForce 8 series of graphic cards has seen the ultra high-end and the high-end 8800GTX and 8800GTS, respectively. These cards are targeted towards a more niche market because not everyone can afford such cards. It is the mid-range segment that has always been the bread and butter for all graphic card manufacturers.

Having said that, Nvidia officially launched their much talked about 8800GTS graphic card yesterday, which is supposedly the successor to the awe-inspiring 7600GT from the GeForce 7 series.

Code-named G84, the 8600GTS like all GeForce 8 series cards has unified shaders instead of separate Pixel and Vertex shaders. Before we go on with the review, let's talk a little more about unified shaders, the problems that led to their development and the general architecture of the cards built using the premises of a unified shader.

Unified Shaders

With the advent of GeForce 8 series, the programmable Pixel and Vertex shaders have been unified. This means that out of the total number of shaders available for rendering, any shader can act as either a Pixel or Vertex shader depending upon the rendering requirements. This pushes up the efficiency to an extremely high level. The unification characteristic makes complete sense as there are certain scenes in a game which don't require much Pixel Shading and in turn don't use all of the available Pixel Shaders. Same thing is also applicable to Vertex Shading. The amount of Pixel or Vertex Shading required is now completely customizable. This is very useful for developers, where they were earlier restricted to hardware counts and even means better frames for the end users.

The presentation slides provided by Nvidia can help one to have a better understanding.

A typical scene like this happens a lot with the current cards. Once can see the unutilized Shaders.

Now, with Unified Shaders this efficiency gap is filled up, making sure that no part of the graphic card is idle.

But unified shaders are not the only technological lead offered by this new series of graphic cards. The cards also feature a built-in Quantum Physics Engine thus offloading more work from the CPU. But, this engine is still in its nascent stages and more development is expected soon.

Other features which got updated in the newer generation include support of 16x Full Screen Anti-Aliasing (FSAA). Earlier, only 16x and 32x FSAA was supported when you had high-end cards in SLI mode. This feature gets enabled or disabled depending upon the performance of the card.

Also, the controversy about Nvidia cards not being capable of doing FP-based HDR with FSAA has been put to rest (finally) as the current generation cards support both HDR and FSAA simultaneously. But as of now, there are only a handful of games that allow you to experience both these effects together.

This is what the GeForce 8 series looks like on paper and you have already seen the performance of the 8800GTX. Let's see if it the 8600GTS can really deliver to its expectations.