Elite Bastards is taking a look at NVIDIA's newest flagship part, the GeForce 8800 GTX
For the GeForce 8800 GTS SKU, parts of this huge core are disabled to provide a part at a cheaper price point, while also improving yields by giving NVIDIA the ability to sell cores that aren't otherwise 100% functional. The upshot of this is that, rather than the 128 Stream Processors (or unified shader units, in other words) present on the GeForce 8800 GTX, the GTS part features just 96 SPs - As these units are divided into clusters of sixteen, this means that the GeForce 8800 GTS has two such clusters disabled. This also means that the core for a GTS part features eight less texturing units than its big brother, giving it a total of forty-eight. One ROP partition is also disabled on the core, giving a total of five on the GTS compared to six on a full GeForce 8800 GTX and leaving this particular SKU with a total of twenty ROPs.ASUS EN8800GTS video card Review
Rather than the 384-bit memory bus utilised by the GeForce 8800 GTX, the GTS part also sees a reduction in this area, down to 320-bit, meaning that only ten memory modules are used on the board - This also means that the GeForce 8800 GTS finds itself with just 640MB of GDDR3 RAM compared to the 768MB on a full GTX part.
