Both mainstream derivatives of NVIDIA's G80 technology, the G86, of which the fastest variant is due to be known as the GeForce 8600GTS is expected at a price point of $50 to $100 less than NVIDIA's current GeForce 8800GTS 320MB solution and is due to clocked at 700MHz for the GPU and 1GHz for the memory, yielding available bandwidth of 32GB/s.
The solution is expected to require the power deliverable by one 6-pin PCIe connector and the G84 chip itself features 64 scalar shaders and is built on an 80nm TSMC process.
With a rumoured price point of under $180, the G84 based GeForce 8600GT, one notch down from the above mentioned GTS solution, will apparently feature a GPU clock speed of 600MHz and 1400MHz effective memory speed.
Both solutions will support either memory configurations of 256MB or 512MB of GDDR3 memory.
Another release, being the 8500 series, will supposedly feature a G84 GPU containing 48 scalar shaders, clearly cut down further from the 64 scalar shaders in the 8600 series and the 128 scalar shaders in the 8800 series.
The 8500 series will apparently feature passive cooling, replace the price point formerly occupied by the 7300GT and be endowed with a GPU clock speed of 450MHz and memory speeds of 800MHz.
Moving on, G86 will be born in the form of the GeForce 8300, which replacing the GeForce 7300GS, is expected at the end of the second quarter.
The suggested launch date for the G84 based solutions is apparently in mid-April, totally avoiding CeBIT, yet perhaps the recent delay to AMD's R600 has bought some further polishing time for NVIDIA and they can make their move on their own terms.
Regardless of politics though, to have high-end and mainstream DirectX 10 parts available before the competition has launched any DirectX 10 parts of their own is something which NVIDIA is undoubtedly proud of, especially since the story was somewhat different when DirectX 9 emerged.
The suggested launch date is apparently when the playable demo of a certain DirectX 10 title is due to be available. I can't think what it could be though...
