GeForce 8600 GTS

Written by - on 05 November 2009. Posted in GeForce 8 Series

The GeForce 8600 GTS is not exactly half of the GeForce 8800 GTX, as many might expect. Let's put it this way: the unified shader architecture left its mark on the "transistor budget" of the G84 chip, and therefore the G80 had to be cut more when "reworked" into the G84 than many users would like. For example, the number of stream processors had to be reduced to 32 pieces - in this sense, the G84 is a quarter of the G80, not a half. However, the number of rasterization units and the memory bus width of the G84 chip allow us to say that it is a third of the G80. The number of texture addressing modules on each TCP (Texture Code Processor) doubled compared to the G80 - from four to eight. It can be seen that in this case there is a step back into the past, when for each processor (4 scalar processors are equivalent to one old vector processor) there are 2 TMUs. There is an emphasis on texture operations.

In terms of the number of transistors, the G84 barely falls short of the status of half of the G80 - the chip has 289 million transistors, while the G80 had 681 million transistors. What does this "quarter" need 289 million transistors for? The unified shader architecture implies the presence of control and service logic in the core of the video chip, which takes up a lot of space regardless of the number of stream processors. Therefore, even when the number of processors is cut four times, there is no proportional reduction in the number of transistors. Yes, G84 and G86 are produced using a thinner 80 nm process technology, but compared to the 90 nm process technology of the G80 chip, it does not provide significant savings in die area, and the G84 and G86 chips should have a good margin to reduce the cost. Obviously, NVIDIA had to "cut" the most necessary, trying to make up for the losses by some optimization of the architecture of the G84 and G86 chips. Let the G84 have 32 stream processors, but in some cases they were able to work with the same efficiency as the 64 processors in the G80 chip.

Specifications NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS

Name	GeForce 8600 GTS
Core	G84
Process technology (µm)	0.08
Transistors (million)	289
Core frequency	675
Memory frequency (DDR)	1000 (2000)
Bus and memory type	GDDR3 128 Bit
Bandwidth (Gb/s)	32
Unified shader blocks	32
Frequency of unified shader units	1450
TMU per conveyor	16 (total)
ROP	8
textures per clock	16
textures per pass	16
Shader Model	4.0
Fill Rate (Mpix/s)	5400
Fill Rate (Mtex/s)	10800
DirectX	10.0
Anti-Aliasing (Max)	SS&MS - 16x
Anisotropic Filtering (Max)	16x
Memory	256/512
Interface	PCI-E
RAMDAC	2x400

GeForce 8600 GTS was able to compete with such monsters of the past GeForce 7900 GT or even GeForce 7950 GT.

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