Moore’s Law demands it, enthusiasts speculate about it and the head honchos at NVIDIA are probably rubbing their hands in anticipation at the prospects of world domination. In case you haven’t guessed, the next evolution in the GeForce 8 series is set to be unleashed today and this new arrival has been predictably dubbed the GeForce 8800 GT.

There is an air of inevitability about this new high-end card. A different core from the ones found in the GeForce 8800 series (G92 instead of the G80) and a die shrink (NVIDIA’s first 65nm core). Same old story, you may think and it won’t be far off the mark, as it seems to be the tradition among chipmakers to produce a more efficient variant of their architecture. History also suggests that it is this second generation that will have the superior price performance ratio, which probably explains all the pre-release excitement surrounding this card.

The new numbering in the core hints that there have been significant changes in the G92 and browsing the documents released by NVIDIA, that seems to be the case. For one, despite the die shrink, the G92 core actually packs more transistors than the G80, at a whopping 754 million compared to the 681 million on the G80. It also exceeds the 700 million transistors on the 80nm ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT. What could be the reason behind the expanded core?

• http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles/view.php?cid=3&id=2406