Nvidia celebrates: Happy Birthday G80 (PCGH Retro Special)

At the latest with the appearance of the Direct-X 11 generation in 2009, the G80 belonged to the old iron, but only rarely had a card previously managed to keep up for so long in terms of technology and performance – most recently the Radeon 9700 Pro. For this reason we dedicate our online retro special to the legendary G80 chip. If you want to read more about Nvidia’s legend Geforce 8800 GTX/GTS/Ultra, you will find an analysis in PCGH 12/2016, which is mainly about what the 8800 GTX is capable of doing 10 years later.

the chips
Nvidia’s G80 is installed in two different versions – including the clock variants there are even three – on the 8800 GTS, the 8800 GTX and the 8800 Ultra. Until the 8800 Ultra appeared, the 8800 GTX was the undisputed top model: 128 shader ALUs, 768 MiByte graphics memory (connected via a 384-bit wide interface) and a unified shader concept in which no differences were made between pixels and vertex shaders will characterize the chip. The clock is 575 MHz for the chip, 1,350 MHz for the shader ALUs and 900 MHz for the RAM.

The smaller version, the 8800 GTS, only has 96 shader ALUs and a 320-bit wide interface to the 640 MiByte memory. In addition, the clock was lowered so that the chip is only clocked at 513 MHz and the RAM at 792 MHz. Finally, the Ultra variant is simply a higher clocked (612 MHz GPU, 1,620 MHz shader, 1,080 MHz RAM clock) 8800 GTX, which has also been equipped with a new cooler to get the increased waste heat under control.

The performance
As the first chip to support DirectX 10, the G80 has a special role to some extent: Nvidia was a technological pioneer here, corresponding products from AMD/Ati only came onto the market later. We recorded the performance of the then extremely fast card in a benchmark test. For at least a year we used an 8800 Ultra (or two in SLI) as the fastest card in the editorial department in order to rule out a graphics card limitation as far as possible in CPU benchmarks.

Variants, spin offs

G80 Tech Demo: Adrianne, featuring the likeness and approximate proportions of US model Adrianne Curry. (5)

Source: PC Games Hardware



Based on the design of the G80, Nvidia launched other products: the G84 and G86 for low-end and mid-range cards, and the G92 for the performance segment. While the mid-range card was less convincing – in some cases it was beaten by the previous generation in DirectX 9 benchmarks – the 8800 GT (G92) was a value for money hit. Other spinoffs based on the G92 came later, including the Geforce 9800 GT/X.

Nvidia Tech Demo: Adrianne
Of course, there was also a suitable tech demo for the G80 launch – as with the Nvidia chips before it. The template for the animated beauty is Adrianne Curry, a model known primarily in the USA. In an interview, she talks about her job as an Nvidia model: she is most irritated when the animated Adrianne looks at the real one from the screen.