When was 8800gtx release

With such a big leap in price, we had hoped to see a proportional leap in performance. Offering the top of the line for what almost amounts to a performance tax would give NVIDIA the ability to sell a card and treat it like a Ferrari.

It would turn high end graphics into a status symbol rather than a commodity. That and having a huge margin part in the mix can easily generate additional profits.

Price gaps larger than performance increases are not unprecedented. In the CPU world, we see prices rise much faster than performance, especially at the high end. It makes sense that NVIDIA would want to capitalize on this sort of model and charge an additional premium for their highest performing part. This way, they also get to introduce a new high end part without pushing down the price of the rest of their lineup. We should also note that this part won't be available until around the 15th of May, and this marks the first launch to totally balk on the hard launch with product announcement standard.

The new clock speeds are MHz for core speeds, 2. Apart from this the card still has MB of video ram which runs on a bit wide memory bus. Find latest and upcoming tech gadgets online on Tech2 Gadgets.

Popular gadgets including laptop, tablet and mobile specifications, features, prices, comparison. Before we dive in, however, we want to give a bit of context on what made G80 so different from what came before. Beginning with the GeForce 3 and Radeon in , both ATI and Nvidia cards could execute small programs via specialized, programmable vertex and pixel shaders.

It looked like this:. The 24 pixel shaders are the large group of six blocks in the middle of the diagram, where each block corresponds to four pixel pipelines 24 pixel shaders, total. G80, in contrast, is rather more familiar:. While previous GPUs were vector processors that could operate concurrently on the red, green, blue, and alpha color components of a single pixel, Nvidia designed the G80 as a scalar processor, in which each streaming processor handled one color component.

At a high level, Nvidia had switched from a GPU architecture with dedicated hardware for specific types of shader programs to an array of relatively simple cores that could be programmed to perform whatever types of shader calculations the application required at that particular moment. The simpler cores could also be clocked much faster. But as with any brand-new architecture, there were significant risks involved. What were some of the challenges associated with making this leap, either in terms of managing the design or choosing which features to include and support?

HL2 was an ATI -friendly title. Jonah Alben : We definitely felt that compute was a risk. John Danskin : This was carefully metered. Inside their budgets, they did an incredible job. G80 was designed to run much more complicated pixel shaders with more branching, dependencies, and resource requirements than previous chips.