The graphics world isn't exactly known for its straightforward nomenclature. With so many suffixes per chip - your GTs, GTXs, Pros, XTs and so on - it's no surprise that punters are often confused about what's what. Two seemingly innocuous letters can separate cards that have absolutely nothing in common performance-wise beyond an ability to make pretty colours appear on your screen. Does NVIDIA's decision to release a third card carrying the 8800GTS name make life easier or more difficult? It's hard to say...

In the wild

You'll spot this latest version of the card because it nominally carries 512MB of memory on board - not unlike the 8800GT, which was recently released to general acclaim and has ensured 'NVIDIA' will be the most popular boys' name for children born this year. Inside its silicon heart there are yet more similarities with the GT: it's based, for example, on the G92 core.

In brief, G92 is a refined version of G80, designed on a 65nm process with a more polished instruction issue engine and capable of much higher clockspeeds. It also features the Pure Video 2 engine for improved HD decoding.

To earn its extra consonant, the 8800GTS has the full complement of 128 stream processors previously seen in the 8800GTX and Ultra cards, and thanks to the difference in G92 architecture, it has double the number of texture address units that those cards boasted. On paper then, it's a superior card in every manner - from clock speeds to shader counts - to every previous NVIDIA chip.

Almost, anyway

Actually, we lied a little there. There is one small detail in which the previous 8800GTS, the GTX and the Ultra all have the upper hand, and that's in the number of ROPS (render output units) and, as a result, the memory bandwidth available. The Ultra and GTX both boast 384-bit interfaces, the previous GTS 320-bits and yet the new GTS 512 has the same four 64-bit controllers as the GT, yielding a total bus between the graphics core and the frame buffer of just 256-bits.

The question is, does it make a difference to performance?