As I suspected last week, Nvidia's new high-end graphics card, the GeForce 9800 GTX, is essentially just a GeForce 8800 GTS with faster clocks.

GeForce 9800 GTX uncovered

Details of the 9800 GTX have been leaked by VR-Zone, and a few other sites. The card's GPU core is clocked at 673MHz with 1,683MHz shaders, and although VR-Zone doesn't know the memory clock, another site, Expreview, managed to get its hands on one for benchmarking. It puts the memory at 1.1GHz (2.2GHz effective due to dual-channel configuration).

Compare this to the GeForce 8800 GTS (the most recent 512MB-equipped version, that is). This has a 650MHz core clock, with 128 shaders running at 1,625MHz and an effective memory clock of 1.94GHz. So unless NVIDIA has somehow managed to unlock some more shaders in the 9800 GTX, it's shaping up to be a mere baby step ahead of GeForce 8.

The 3DMark06 score that Expreview quotes of just over 14,000 is only about 25 per cent ahead of the GeForce 8800 GTX when it was first launched. And that would have been with a dual-core processor rather than quad-core. So the difference on the same platform will be even less.

No wonder Nvidia chose to focus on the 9600 GT as the vanguard of the GeForce 9 series. Thanks to its faster clocks and doubling of the shader allocation from 32 to 64, the 9600 GT really is a leap forward from its 8600 GT predecessor.

Is Nvidia saving the big stuff for another day?

Perhaps this explains the strange strategy with the launch of GeForce 9 series. GeForce 7 wasn't a huge increment over GeForce 6 either, at least not in terms of technology. GeForce 7 had a few more vertex and pixel shaders and texturing units, plus a mildly faster core clock. But it was a development of the same basic theme.

The GeForce 8, with its adoption of unified shaders, was the sea change. After that, it's not surprising we're back to incremental steps for a while. The G90 series chips, which first arrived in the 512MB GeForce 8800 GTS, are essentially the G80 of the GeForce 8 series, but made with a 65nm process rather than 90nm. Apart from some major improvements to the PureVideo features, there are few significant architectural changes.

The one thing the 9800 GTX will have going for it over its direct predecessor, the 8800 GTX, if not the 8800 GTS, will be power consumption. Thanks to the reduction in chip size, the GeForce 9800 GTX can run faster and consume the same or less Watts.

Even if you don't care about saving the planet, complete speed freaks will be able to create a more stable Tri-SLI setup. When your graphics cards on their own require a peak power close to 600W, losing 100W or more will really help bring PSU requirements back into the realms of sanity.

But otherwise the Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX doesn't look like it's going to set the world on fire, although the dual-chip 9800 GX2 version might be more to write home about. It looks like Nvidia is milking the technology it developed for G80 for all it can, and holding back its truly new developments for another time. With Intel's graphics now allegedly waiting in the wings, perhaps Nvidia is keeping its trump cards close to its chest for a future battle.