Tom's Hardware TW has published a photo of a G96 ES (Engineering Sample) as well as some of its specifications.
This GPU should be found in the GeForce 9500 GT. Engraved in 65nm, versus 80nm for the G84 and G86, it naturally supports PCI-Express 2.0 and manages OpenGL 2.1; however, it still does not include DirectX 10.1 support when this should arrive this quarter with the release of the Windows Vista Service Pack 1. There will be a Purevideo 3 engine adding VC-1 decoding, which is currently one of the strong points of the Radeon HD (with the exception of the 2900). Furthermore, it is described as compatible with the recently announced
Hybrid Power.
In terms of frequencies, we have a respective 650/1650/800-900 MHz for the GPU, shader cores and 256 MB of memory relayed to a bus with a width of 128 bits. The big unknown remains the number of scalar processors it will have. As there are 64 planned for the GeForce 9600 GT, we can hope its smaller sibling will have 32 activated scalar processors, without which it could be closer to the 8500 GT than the 8600.
