HD 2600 & GeForce 8600: No Mid-Range?

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What About Nvidia?

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Specification	GeForce 8800 GTX	GeForce 8800 GTS	GeForce 8600 GTS	GeForce 8600 GT	GeForce 8500 GT	GeForce 8400 GS	GeForce 8300 GS
Processor	G80	G80	G84	G84	G86	G86	G86
Fabrication Process	90 nm	90 nm	80 nm	80 nm	80 nm	80 nm	80 nm
Number of Transistors (millions)	681	681	289	289	210	210	210
Core Clock (Including dispatch, texture units, and ROP units)	575 MHz	500 MHz	675 MHz	540 MHz	450 MHz	450 MHz	450 MHz
Shader Clock (Stream Processors)	1.35 GHz	1.20 GHz	1.45 GHz	1.19 GHz	900 MHz	900 MHz	900 MHz
Stream Processors (#)	128	96	32	32	16	16	8
Memory Clock (MHz / data rate)	900/1800	800/1600	1000/2000	700/1400	400/800	400/800	400/800
Memory Interface	384 Bits	320 Bits	128 Bits	128 Bits	128 Bits	64 Bits	64 Bits
Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec)	86.4 GB/s	64.0 GB/s	32.0 GB/s	22.4 GB/s	12.8 GB/s	6.4 GB/s	6.4 GB/s
Frame Buffer Size	768 MB	640 MB	256 MB	256 MB	256 MB	128 MB or 256 MB	128 MB or 256 MB
ROPs (#)	24	20	8	8	8	4	4
Texture filtering rate (texels per clock)	64	48	16	16	8	8	8
Texture Fill Rate (Billions of bilinear filtered texels/sec)	36.80 GT/s	24.00 GT/s	10.80 GT/s	8.64 GT/s	3.60 GT/s	3.60 GT/s	3.60 GT/s
HDCP Support	Yes	Yes	Yes	Optional	Optional	Optional	Optional
RAMDACs	400 MHz	400 MHz	400 MHz	400 MHz	400 MHz	400 MHz	400 MHz
Bus Technology	PCI Express 1.1a	PCI Express 1.1a	PCI Express 1.1a	PCI Express 1.1a	PCI Express 1.1a	PCI Express 1.1a	PCI Express 1.1a

One fact that you should be able to pull out from this table is that there is a huge gap between the 8800 and 8600. The GeForce 8600 GTS has a quarter the shaders of the 8800 GTX, and one third the shaders of the 8800 GTS. In similar fashion, the 8800 GTX can do four times as many raster operations as the 8600 GTS, and the 8800 GTS can do 2.5 times as many. The data path has the same scaling as the ROPs. The memory interface was also crippled, being only 128 bits wide compared to 384 bits for the 8800 GTX and 320 bits for the 8800 GTS. This means that bandwidth is a little more than one third that of the 8800 GTX and half of the 8800 GTS. Clearly the mid-range is not a classical mid-range we have come to understand over the past five years.