So far the GeForce 8 series has been met with great affection, and as expected, NVIDIA have today (well yesterday) announced the missing pieces of the jigsaw. For all intent and purpose, the Geforce 8 series line up is now complete from top to bottom, DX10 galore is now at the feet of the masses.

NVIDIA have announced five new mainstream DX10 cards which bring the feature set and architectural design of the more expensive 8800 cards to much lower price points, and thus into many more peoples budgets. Two of the five will not be available in the retail sector and are intended purely for system builders (the 8400 and 8300), so that leaves us with three:

The New Additions Card: 8600 GTS 8600 GT 8500 GT Chip: G84 G84 G86 Transistors: 289m 289m n/a DX support DX10 + SM4.0 DX10 + SM4.0 DX10 + SM4.0 Process: 80nm 80nm 80nm Stream Processors: 32 FP32 scalar ALU's 32 FP32 scalar ALU's 16 FP32 scalar ALU's ROPS: 8 8 4 Core Clock: 675 MHz 540 MHz 450 MHz Shader Clock: 1.45GHz 1.19 GHz 900 MHz Memory Clock: 1000 MHz 700 MHz 400 MHz Memory interface: 128 bit 128 bit 128 bit Memory Bandwidth: 32 GB/s 22.4 GB/s 12.8 GB/s Memory Size: 256 MB 256 MB 256 / 512 MB

While the 8500 GT will offer decent performance for it's price tag, the real interest for us (and probably you) lies squarely with the 8600 GT and GTS. The only difference between these two are clock speeds, so both have 8 rops, 128 bit memory interface, 32 stream processors and so on. You may feel 32 is little on the low side, but there are a few differences between G80 and G84's shader blocks, the latter having the upper hand. For example, in an 8800 GTX you find 8 shader "blocks" and each contains 16 SP's, 8 texture filter, and 4 texture address units. With G84 each block contains 16 SP's, 8 texture filter, and 8 texture address units. The end result is that the ratio of SP's to texture units has doubled, so there's more performance per shader block than those found on G80.

Because there are far less SP's and what not in G84, the transistor count is drastically reduced over G80, it's much more in line with G71 in fact at 281m, and let's not forget the move to 80nm. All these cuts have there benefits - power consumption for the GTS is rated at only 71W max, and the GT at 43 watts. Also noteworthy is that the GT doesn't require a PCI-E power plug.

On the memory front, bandwidth has been culled over it's big brothers, courtesy of a 128 bit memory controller. The end result is that the 8600 GTS with it's 2GHz memory can only produce 32 GB/s, while the 1.4GHz GT lags further behind at 22.4 GB/s.

For those who have followed both the 6 and 7 series launches, you can't help but respect NVIDIA's launch strategies. While some would certainly prefer a top to bottom lineup from day one, the approach NVIDIA has used for the last three generations have never failed to impress, especially when compared to ATI, of whom in the past have most certainly cracked the high end market, but always seem to struggle to offer a fully complete and competitive mid to low end product range. However, NVIDIA's strategy for the future is looking a little different. While we can still expect a staggered launch strategy in the future starting with the top end parts, and soon followed by the rest of the family, it has been noted that the "hard launch" is to be a thing of the past. In fact technically even the launch for the 8600 series today is not really a hard launch per se, with some cards (8600 GT and lower brethren's) unavailable in retail until the end of April.

But don't worry too much, it's extremely unlikely we will have to encounter a launch followed by zero availability for months thereafter, the plan is to announce new cards, and follow this up a few weeks later with high availability in retail channels. No one has forgotten or forgiven the excruciating paper launches of yesteryear (X850 PE, 7800 GTX 512MB, etc), so expect the media to keep a close eye on how this all progresses.

In this initial review we will only be looking at the 8600 GTS, but will follow this up with the 8600 GT in a few days time. Foxconn were kind enough to send us there reference clocked board, so lets get on and see what all fuss is about.