The New Way of Graphics, and More

NVIDIA launched their new graphics chip architecture, the chip code-named G80. Check out these reviews of how the performance blows away yesterday's best graphics.

• Bjorn3D's review
• Guru3D GeForce 8800 GTS & GTX review
• Tom's Hardware GeForce 8800: Here Comes the DX10 Boom

This page has the G80 Hardware Specs. How about 681 million transistors?

The architecture is very interesting and different from past GPUs designed by NVIDIA or ATI (AMD). Rather than dedicated compute engines for different stages of the "graphics pipeline", this new architecture has scores of 1.35 GHz streaming processors that can be assigned to the most demanding graphics tasks for a particular game or scene. Because of this generality, it can be applied to completely new problems, as described in ExtremeTech's article:

As you might imagine, this will be aimed at highly parallelizable compute tasks, such as scientific computing, financial analysis and oil exploration. Nvidia will actually be offering a C compiler to facilitate thread computing, so programmers interested in general-purpose programming with the GPU don't have to be locked into Direct3D semantics. -- GeForce 8800 GTX: 3D Architecture Overview