Test Setup and Methods

A good bunch of our testing took place on a different systemt to the one outlined below, but hardware failure with some memory modules meant a swap to a bit of an atypical test setup for our initial G84 investigations. High-end Core 2 Extreme, i975X and 4GiB of memory won't be the usual partners for an 8600 GTS, so forgive us that particular sin.

Added to that hardware list is an Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive, connected to the system via USB2.0. Software comprises the ForceWare 158.14 driver for Windows Vista x86, Vista Business x86 itself, a beta version of WinDVD to enable support for things we'll talk about shortly, and our usual raft of synthetics.

We don't look at gaming performance in this piece, and for that we say sorry to XFX (and Matt @ XFX in particular). Grief with the way NVIDIA managed press for this product, the aforementioned hardware issues, and difficulty with Vista x64 prevented us from presenting that data in time for this investigation into what G84 is capable of. We'll take a look at that data in due course, and at both GTS and GT XXX.

Instead we focus on some video decoding performance data and synthetic benchmark tests, given that G84 is fundamentally changed from G80 in terms of configuration and the sampler hardware, and because it sports a brand new pair of logic blocks for video decode. We'll start our G84 investigation with a look at the architecture from a somewhat high level.