The Chip

G84 is built on TSMC's 80nm process and comprises 289M transistors, including display output logic, in a die area around 169mm². Like G80, it supports DirectX Shader Model 4.0, and the basics of the chips threaded and unified shader architecture can be traced to G80 too. It's natively PCI Express capable, with no announced SKUs that'd see it bridged to AGP.

Of course, the heritage extends to most of the chip's basic attributes, and we'll repeat the guts of those here before we go on to explain the fundamental differences.

  • NVIDIA G80 Architecture
    • Full Direct3D 10 Support
    • DirectX10 Shader Model 4.0 Support
      • Vertex Shader 4.0
      • Geometry Shader 4.0
      • Pixel Shader 4.0
      • Internal 128-bit Floating Point (FP32) Precision
    • Unlimited Shader Lengths
    • Up to 128 textures per pass
    • Support for FP32 texture formats with filtering
    • Non-Power of two texture support
    • 8 multiple Render Targets
  • NVIDIA Lumenex Technology
    • Full FP32 floating point support throughout the entire pipeline
    • FP32 floating point frame buffer support
    • Up to 8x, gamma adjusted, native multisampling FSAA with jittered or rotated grids
    • Up to 16x, coverage sample antialiasing
    • Transparent multisampling and supersampling
    • Lossless color, texture, Z and stencil data compression
    • Fast Z clear
    • Up to 16x anisotropic filtering
  • NVIDIA SLI Support
  • NVIDIA Pure Video HD Technology
    • Adaptable programmable video processor with GPU shader core assist and post processing
    • High Definition video decode acceleration (H.264, VC-1, WMV-HD, MPEG2-HD)
    • Spatial temporal de-interlacing
    • Inverse 2:2 and 3:2 pull-down (inverse telecine)

We'll take a look at the boards XFX sent along, explaining the two SKUs launching today that are based on G84, before we have a closer look at the architecture changes that separate G84 from G80.