'As for the 8600, right out of the gate, 32 SPs mean one third the clock for clock shader power of the 8800 GTS. At the same time, NVIDIA has increased the ratio of Texture address units to SPs from 1:4 to 1:2. We also see a 1:1 ratio of texture address and filter units. These changes prompted NVIDIA to further optimize their scheduling algorithms.
The combination of greater resource availability and improved scheduling allow for increased efficiency. In other words,
clock for clock, G84 SPs are more efficient than G80 SPs. This makes it harder to compare performance based on specifications. Apparently stencil culling performance has also been improved, which should help boost algorithms like the Doom 3 engine's shadowing technique. NVIDIA didn't give us any detail on how stencil culling performance was improved, but indicated that this, among other things, was also tweaked with the new hardware.
Top this off with the fact that G84 has also been enhanced for higher clock speeds than G80 and we can expect much more work to be done by each SP per second than on 8800 hardware. Exactly how much is something we don't have an easy way of measuring as changes in efficiency will vary by the algorithms running on the hardware as well.'
Source - AnandTech's review -
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2970&p=2
Originally Posted by Marduk_25
'As for the 8600, right out of the gate, 32 SPs mean one third the clock for clock shader power of the 8800 GTS. At the same time, NVIDIA has increased the ratio of Texture address units to SPs from 1:4 to 1:2. We also see a 1:1 ratio of texture address and filter units. These changes prompted NVIDIA to further optimize their scheduling algorithms.
Bookmarks