NVIDIA 9600 GT 512MB Review

Page 2 - Technical specifications of G94

Clearly the core GeForce 9600 GT has some similarities with G92 from 8800 GT. For beginning - G94 is made by the е TSMC 65nm process. The chip surface is 225mm2 and has 505 million transistors or with 1/3 less than G92. The chip runs by default at 650MHz, and it's stream processors at 1625MHz - a tad higher than the defaults of 8800 GT. Difference is, instead 112, in 9600 GT they are mere 64 1D and are grouped in four clusters of 16 pieces, sharing 8 texture units, capable of addressing or filtering one texture each cycle. This is the same architecture NVIDIA are using ever since the release of G86. Each cluster possesses independent cache, amount of which NVIDIA keeps secret, just like it's work frequency.

Just as in G92, the chip has solid overclock potential (as we'll see later in the review) and many of the videocard manufacturers do sell their products overclocked. But let's get back to the other special architecture features of G94 - it has 4 blocks of 4 rasterising processors or 16 (ROPs) as whole. Each block capable of processing 32 pixels each cycle, in care each pixel has only Z component. Each of the blocks communicates with the memory via 64bitchannel. Thus 4x64 equals to a 256bit bus.

We'll skip most of the details around the features that the chip offers, like direct HD decoding and such, since we're not witnessing anything new or revolutionary. Since G94 looks just like a bit cut G92, most probably you're wondering why the heck the first G92 (8800 GT & GTS 512) based cards are са 8th and not 9th series, as it is logical to be! Well G92 is totally new architecture and has nothing in common with the other 8th series cards. It is a fact that NVIDIA's policy on naming the cards is horrible, just as we stated before. Still, prior to October 2007, when the first 8800 GT was released, it was always assumed that the GTS variation of a card is faster than the GT. Here not only 8800 GT was surpassing in any way the older 8800 GTS 320 / 640, but the release of new absolutely altered 8800 GTS 512MB model totally confused the regular users! How would a regular user know that 8800 GTS 640MB е is much worse choice than 8800 GTS 512MB - it is against all logic. In the end NVIDIA explained that this move was necessary, because if the first cards based on G92 would have been released as 9800 (as they should), that would vastly decrease sales of the older 8th series videocards at the end of 2007. As if it didn't happen anyway... :)

Now let's see Point of View 9600 GT up close...