NVIDIA GeForce 8800M GTX SLI vs vs Vivante GC800

NVIDIA GeForce 8800M GTX SLI

Two Nvidia GeForce 8800M GTX cards are combined in SLI. With this setup, users should be able to play DirectX 10 PC games on high detail settings and resolutions. Nonetheless, not every game supports SLI efficiently. As a result, only an increase of 0-40% is obtainable over a single 8800M GTX, depending on the application and driver support. Overall performance should still be similar to a 9800M GT SLI combination.

A particular feature of the GeForce 8800M GTX SLI is Unified Shaders. Dedicated pixel and vertex shaders have been replaced with 2x96 Stream Processors, which have now taken over much of the graphics rendering work. The Shader units are also clocked higher than the core chip itself (1250 MHz versus 800 MHz).

The performance of an 8800M GTX in SLI is much better than an 8700M GT in SLI and even the GeForce 7950 GTX in SLI.

The current consumption (about 2x35 Watt TDP) and created heat of dual 8800M GTX cards are much higher compared to the 8700M GT in SLI. This reserves the 8800M GTX SLI setup for larger laptops with more powerful (and possibly louder) cooling solutions.

Vivante GC800

The Vivante GC800 is an integrated graphics card for ARM based (e.g. Rockchip RK291x) and MIPS based (e.g. Actions ATM701x) SoCs. It offers a single VEC-4 (or in other words four VEC-1) unified shaders and supports OpenGL ES 2.0 (optional ES 3.0), OpenGL 2.0, OpenVG 1.1, DirectX 9_3 (optional) and OpenCL 1.2 (optional). The clock rate can be choosen between 315 and 575 MHz in 40nm designs and up to 800 MHz in 28nm designs.