* The G80 is expected to be released anywhere from August to October 2006.
* It will be the first Direct3D 10 and Shader Model 4.0 card to be released.
* The G80 will be a 32 pipeline card with 32 pixel shaders, 16 vertex shaders, and 16 geometry shaders per core.
* The G80 may be dual core.
* There will be 2 cards released at launch, the flagship 8800GTX and the slightly slower 8800GT. The 8800GTX will have 512 MB of ram while the 8800GT will have from 256 MB-512 MB of RAM and will also have slower clock speeds than the 8800GTX.
* The 8800GTX will cost $499-599 while the 8800GT will cost $299-399. [1]
* The G80 will not have unified shaders, but will still be DirectX10 compliant.
* The memory interface is said to be Samsung's new GDDR4 specification.
* The series is also rumored to have fast memory and core clocks, but will still be built on 90nm technology to avoid unnecessary risks.
* Anandtech reports that the next generation of GPUs will range in power consumption from 130W to 300W. This increase in power consumption will make for higher-wattage Power Supply Units (to the 1 kW-1.2 kW range) and/or the addition of internal, secondary PSUs solely for powering the GPUs.[2]
* In addition, many manufacturers are looking at liquid-based cooling elements (as opposed to the traditional heatsink/fan combo) to keep the noise and heat levels down on these next-generation of GPUs.
* The G80 should also feature UDI connections with full HDCP support.
* There will be no AGP version of a GeForce 8 Card.