Nvidia's Hybrid SLI technology

GeForce 8200

Nvidia talked a lot about the GeForce 8200’s capabilities, but didn’t really divulge any details on its gaming performance, or any of its technical specifications for that matter.

In fact, the only slide during Nvidia’s presentation that talked about the GeForce 8200’s gaming prowess was one that said DirectX 10 support will be a requirement for Vista Premium certification from June 2008 – this included obligatory artwork from World in Conflict and BioShock (pictured below).

Instead, Nvidia’s focus in this particular portion of the presentation was on the chip’s HD video processing prowess. The GeForce 8200 is designed for micro ATX motherboards and Nvidia has integrated a new PureVideo HD engine that fully offloads decoding for all Blu-ray and HD DVD movies (including support for MPEG-2, VC-1 and H.264).

To be fair, there is a lot more to the GeForce 8200's PureVideo HD engine than this, but in the interests of keeping on topic, we’ll save that for a later article. Anyway, what I’m trying to get across to you is that the new enhancements to the PureVideo HD engine makes the GeForce 8200 integrated graphics chipset ideal for a home theatre PC on paper.


We said early on that the nForce 700a series’ integrated motherboard GPU isn’t a brute, and from what I gather, the nForce 780a SLI, 750a SLI and 730a chipsets may not include the new PureVideo HD engine -- nobody could confirm it for sure, but some sources suggested that this is the case. However, what I can confirm though is that the rest of the GPU is pretty much the same.

Given that Nvidia is looking to pair this with the GeForce 8400 GS and GeForce 8500 GT cards for GeForce Boost, we’re going to go out on a limb and say that the GeForce 8200 (and nForce 700a series mGPUs) have just one cluster of 16 stream processors. This cluster will look exactly the same as the clusters in any GeForce 8-series product released after the GeForce 8600/8500 series.


In other words, there will be eight texture address units and eight texture filtering units alongside the 16 stream processors. What is less obvious to me at the moment is how many ROP partitions (each able to output four pixels per clock) there are in the chip – one answer would be that there are two, and the other would be that there is just one. The other thing that is even more unclear at the moment is the clockspeeds of the various motherboard GPUs—and whether they’re clocked the same—but I’m sure we’ll find out those once we’ve got hardware in hand.

Regardless of clockspeeds though, the motherboard GPU is pretty useless for gaming on its own—much like the GeForce 8500 GT and GeForce 8400 GS in my opinion—but when you combine the mGPU with an entry-level discrete GPU, you end up with something that isn’t all that far behind a GeForce 8600 GT. As I’m sure you know, I don’t hold the GeForce 8600 GT in a much higher regard, but it is able to play recent games relatively well without having to set almost everything to the lowest quality settings.