Thread: NVIDIA GeForce 9600GT specifications

After introducing theirs most successful GeForce 8-series cards the 8800 GT in the market, just after four months NVIDIA launched its new G94-based GeForce 9-series without much fanfare. Nothing like the earlier generation that started with the most powerful card in the line-up, NVIDIA has this time started at the middle with the 9600GT, a supposed successor to the 8600GT now there has been a lot of speculation and rumors about the performance of the 9600GT. But before we talk about performance, let's check out what the new GPU and the G94, has to offer.

The G94
It is being designed in such a way using a 65nm fabrication process to fit on small power-efficient graphics cards, these GPU allows the processors to run at a speed of 1625 MHz a much much more 20%improvement over the first generation processors which were used in the GeForce 8800 GTX. Which were using 64 stream processors the GPU work more powerfully and requires very few transistors. To add more boost to the pixels shaders provided by the card the texture engine has been fixed with double addressing capabilities, allowing it almost 8 bilinear addresses to be calculated and 8 texels filtered per cycle. NVIDIA claims that these architectural improvements enable the newest 9600 GT to perform better than a 64-stream processor version of the GeForce 8800 GTX. They also say that in real-world performance, a pair of GeForce 9600 GT cards can do better than a single GeForce 8800 GTX. Let's confirm that last claims a little later; for now, let's see what height a single 9600GT can scale.

The 9600GT borrows the 8800GT's sleek looks and its single slot design. It has two dual-link DVI outputs and an S-Video port at the back, and comes with a DVI-D to HDMI converter. The HSF assembly is enclosed by use of plastic canopy that covers the full face of the card, and is colored black with silver part-NVIDIA logo markings. The HSF assembly is made by use of a copper and aluminum heat sink to release more heat and a black plastic fan on top that runs very smooth and quiet. The 9600GT uses only 95W (max) of power, and thus requires the extra power supplied by a 6-pin connector to the card.The G94 in the 9600GT is clocked at 650 MHz, while the memory runs at an effective 1800 MHz. It uses a 256-bit memory interface and has 512 MB of GDDR3 memory.



The GeForce 9600 GT offers complete support for PCI Express 2.0, which notionally doubles the bandwidth available to the card to 8 GBps in each direction, providing a total of 16 GBps of memory bandwidth. It also supports a maximum resolution of 2560 x 1600, and also supports the High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP). Also included is that NVIDIA is Pure Video HD technology, which gives advanced picture quality and smooth movies with 100% (rated) offload of H.264 video decoding from the CPU -- and much reduced power consumption.

Additional features of the 9600GT
The additional features of 9600GT include full DX10 support as well as support for latest Giga Thread technology, NVIDIA's Lumenex engine, Quantum Effects technology, OpenGL 2.0, Bad Edit Correction, and Inverse telecine (3:2 & 2:2 blow up correction), among others. For experiencing a test with these card you should have system which should have a CPU of AMD Athlon 5000+ (AM2, 2 x 2.60 GHz) and a motherboard of ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe and memory of almost 2GB 750MHZz and almost 250GB of hard disk and a 19” Lcd monitor and you can use operating systems like windows XP or windows Vista Home basic effective by the performance of the 9600GT in the 3D Mark 2005 and 2006 benchmarks, we were a little amazed by the scores: it was coming severely close to the 8800GT's scores, but the game benchmarks set the record straight.

The 9600GT's performance is almost at all times around 45 to 50% higher than that of the 8600GTS, and about 25% lower than that of the 8800GT. As such, it has perfectly filled the performance gap difference between the 8600GTS and the 8800GT. The company think to launch more of G94 cards in the market, we may just see similar gaps being filled and newer ones created. Generally, the 9600GT performs very well at all resolutions and in games, DX9 or DX10. And even you can manage to play Crysis at a reasonable 30 fps, at medium settings, of course and it was great in the performance and it can be specially used for gaming.

Overclocking
NVIDIA declares that the 9600GT is clocked at 650/1800 MHz (Core/Memory) at stock, and scored 13387 points in 3D Mark 2005 and we were able to push the clocks to 700/1850 MHz (Core/Memory), registering a jump of 7.7% and 2.8% for the core and memory respectively. The 3D Mark 2005 score at these settings went up by 118 points, registering a jump of just 0.88%. Even though percentage-wise it's not even worth a mention, a jump of 118 points is good enough for an engineering sample, so we'll let this one slide by.