Its been a little over a year since nVidia launched their 7000 series of GPU in Paris last year at a happening event. Today, with much less fan fare and no launch party, nVidia is introducing their 88xx series of graphics cards. Also unlike their previous launches where one high-end card was unveiled, nVidia is introducing two flavors of the 8800 series this time around- the 8800GTX and the 8800GTS. We had to rely on our contacts within the industry for getting these graphics cards as nVidia hasn’t sent out any cards as per our understanding.

Features
The GeForce 8800 GTX GPU implements a massively parallel, unified shader design. Each stream processor is capable of being dynamically allocated to vertex, pixel, geometry, or physics operations. NVIDIA’s GigaThreadTM technology implemented in GeForce 8 Series GPUs supports thousands of independent, simultaneously executing threads, maximizing GPU utilization.

Vista & Direct-X 10
GeForce 8800 GPUs provide full support for Vista which includes Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM), Vista’s Desktop Windows Manager (DWM) composited desktop, the Aero interface using DX9 3D graphics, fast context switching, GPU resource virtualization support, and OpenGL Installable Client Driver (ICD) support.

These GPUs are also the first shipping GPUs to include all required hardware functionality defined in Microsoft’s Direct3D 10 (DirectX 10 or DX10) specification and full support for the DirectX 10 unified shader instruction set and Shader Model 4 capabilities. New features implemented in GeForce 8800 Series GPUs that work in concert with DirectX 10 features include geometry shader processing, stream output, improved instancing, and support for the DirectX 10 unified instruction set.

PureVideoHD
nVidia’s PureVideo HD capability is built into every GeForce 8800 Series GPU and is comprised of dedicated GPU-based video processing hardware, software drivers, and software-based players that accelerate decoding and enhance image quality of high-definition video in H.264, VC-1, WMV/WMV-HD, and MPEG-2 HD formats. PureVideo HD can deliver 720p, 1080i, and 1080p high definition output and support for both 3:2 and 2:2 pulldown (inverse telecine) of HD interlaced content. All GeForce 8800 GPUs are HDCP-capable meeting the security specifications of the Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD formats, allowing the playback of encrypted movie content on PCs when connected to HDCP-compliant displays.

Quantum Effects & CUDA
Last year’s ATI’s X1800 series launch event focused on something called GPGPU which basically allows physics or parallel processing by using the GPU instead of the CPU. nVidia also introduces this with their 8800 series GPUs in the form of Quantum Effects and CUDA. Quantum Effects technology enables more physics effects to be simulated and rendered on the GPU whereas CUDA provides a unified hardware and software solution for data-intensive computing. However, with dual core and Quad Core CPUs becoming the norm, we feel that developers can easily use one or two CPU cores for Physics and let the GPU do what its best at- processing graphics.