We seem to be witnessing an interesting race of information "leaks" on the GeForce 9900 GTX and its GPU, the GT200, these past few days. Information proliferates, it’s matched up and overall it sounds credible. 3D files have notably been leaked on the XtremeSystems forum and an extract of these files corresponds to the following:
You may have noted the presence of a companion chip, the NVIO (on the left), like on the first GeForce 8s and which manages the video inputs and outputs. We don’t really know why Nvidia opted for this solution which theoretically is more costly than integration to the GPU. Very weakly resembling some tubing on the upper left hand side is the diode cable like we find on the 9800 GTX. Otherwise, the size of the two cards are identical both measuring 27cm.
There are also 8 memory chips on the back of the PCB corresponding to a 512 bit memory bus (sixteen 32 bit chips). However, note that sixteen 32 bit chips can also be used to put more memory on a 256 bit bus by pairing 2 chips, although this seems highly unlikely in this case.
PCOnline has published photos of the card’s cooling system:
All details concerning the chip are not yet known, but it should be the first derived from GeForce 8 architecture which introduces some real differences. This will probably be in the form of 64 bit support in floating points for CUDA and slightly modified architecture to increase calculation power more than anything else.
Moreover, VR-Zone, which also adds to the pool of information, goes in this direction by publishing details that correspond to the same rumors we’ve heard. According to their inside source, the GT200 will have 10 partitions (versus 8 in the G92) for a total of 240 scalar processors. This suggests that each partition has 24 scalar processors (3x8) while up until now this number was at 16 (2x8). This enables significantly increasing calculation power by leaving other parts (i.e. notably those that handle texturing) on a similar level.
In short, the only things left are the frequencies, price and especially performances. However, for this we will have to wait for the beginning of summer.
