Before moving on to what makes this card unique from others, let's do a quick refresh of the 8800 series in case you've missed out. Transitions such as that seen with the GeForce 8800 do not happen very often because usually we see revisions of previous products from graphics companies with mild changes in architecture and every now and then huge leaps forward. This is one of the times we see that leap as the 8800 is based off a brand new architecture, fully functional with DirectX 10 and represents a shift in the way the graphics processor works. Foremost of this is what Nvidia calls unified shaders featured in Microsoft's new DirectX10 which allow them to work as vertex or pixel shaders dynamically, increase texture size to 8,000 by 8,000 and generally raise the bar in efficiency and performance. 128 stream processors are featured on the GPU and the entire chip comes in at a whopping 680 million transistors.



Link: AMdZone