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GeForce 7800 GTX Review
ThinSkin writes "ExtremeTech has the first review of nVidia's latest GPU architecture, the Geforce 7800 GTX. Benchmarked against nVidia's previous 6800 Ultra and ATI's latest Radeon X850 XT PE, the 7800 GTX comes out as the fastest video card to date. The unit ships today with a price tag of $599. While nVidia may enjoy this brief moment in the limelight with the fastest card, it may be short-lived once ATI comes out with their latest GPU technology, code-named R520, which is suspected to come out within the next two months."
"...gamers and PC builders staunchly defend their favorite brands while throwing mud in the face of the other, treating anecdotal evidence as gospel"
Am I truly the only person willing to switch happily between Nvidia and ATi, depending on which best fits my needs at the time?
A few things:
a) They are pricing themselves beyond reason for even enthusiasts. Not too long ago, the top level for a graphics card was $400. That was expensive but within reach. I think they may be passing the point were even the enthusiast crowd will purhcase this.
b) Most people will wait until the next products come out from them and ATI. I mean, when you know that cheaper products will come out with most of the performance AND that better products will come out with better performance in this same series, why buy this? Just one example - remember ATI's 9700.
c) It's just for prestige anyway. That's the real reason this card has been released. They'll wait until ATI comes out with a reply card, wait a few months, and come out with something faster again and get good PR OR not have anything faster and suffer the consequences in bad PR.
I'm an nVidia fan, but if R520 is as good as everyone says, I'm getting that
Stick with nVidia, especially if you're running an OS other than Windows. ATI drivers in Linux still stink.
unless an IT job actually pays me good money
So.. much.. pain.. felt.
The R520 is going to be insanely expensive, just like the 7800GTX. These are bleeding edge enthusiast level cards not really intended for the mass market. The nutjobs aka early adopters spend $600+ USD to get the latest and greatest vid card and then a year later everyone else gets the same technology for $150.
I say this as one of the aforementioned nutjobs.
- Toby
There has been some talk about the death of PC gaming. With video cards costing this much, it's cheaper to just buy a gaming console and get better effects out of that.
I am Lord Snowbeam. Heed my call!
While it's true that this doesn't seem to be much of an increase in speed especially compared to moving from the nvidia 5xxx FX series to the 6xxx series of videocards, the 7800 gtx does make it faster than ATI's current fastest card. This makes it so when a regular (non-nerd) person who plays the occasional computer game asks his/her computer nerd friend "hey, who makes the fastest video cards right now" the response will be Nvidia. That means that the non-nerd person will be more likely to buy the Nvidia card based on the "recommendation" from their computer nerd friend. So nvidia just needs to make this product available even though few people will buy it to make it worth it.
When all those articles were coming out about Doom 3 being such a sophisticated engine that current hardware couldn't take full advantage of it, I couldn't help but wonder, how do you know that? How do you test a claim regarding performance on non-existent hardware? So, that got me wondering, was Doom 3 tested on nvidia 7800 prototypes, or maybe 8800 (pretending it exists)? Further to the point, if Id has access to this avant garde stuff, what can we expect?
I'm not writing this as a skeptic. I'm honestly just curious.
"$599 for a video card!?!" You are thinking of "video card as toy" and yes, a $600 toy is expensive but I've worked on video subsystems costing 100 times more than $600. For some applications $60K is reasonable. For many non-toy applications $600 is a total "steal" I'm thinking of scientific visualzation and enginerring. We spent $600 of the nVidia video card in this computer (the one I'm typing this on) It's a drop in the bucket compared to the department's budget for coputer hardware.
But it's stupid to spend $600 on a toy you don't need. If you have money to burn give it to the Red Cross or somthing.
Anybody else think that this sort of thing just isn't sustainable?
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
I was at a presentation NVidia held here in San Francisco where they talked about it, and my vague understanding (they mentioned the PS3 mostly just to keep the crowd whipped up) was that the PS3 card was based on the 6800 model, though it would still support stuff like Shader Model 3.0, and possibly their High Dynamic Range rendering, too.
Moo
Are you really this unaware of how the GPU market works? There will be budget versions of the nVidia cards. Period.
In fact, nVidia is the choice of many enthusiasts right now specifically because they pulled through with a solidly performing mid-range card in the 6600 where ATI failed to do so. ATI's competitor to the 6600GT was supposed to be the X700XT - IE: the card that was paper launched and *NEVER* made it to market. So while ATI had a slight lead on the high end this time around, nVidia was the way to go for those of us who aren't comfortable spending $400 on a video card.
Whether ATI will repeat that mistake this generation remains to be seen, but nVidia getting a two month certainly won't help. While I doubt it'll be a GeForce FX fiasco, it's certainly going to be an uphill battle for them.
On another note, is the price tag worth it? Theres a lot of geforce 6800 Ultra/Radeon x800XT/850 users who arent going to see nothing more than a 10fps increase in Doom3 at 1600x1200 4xFSAA.
If you already own one of those cards, prossibly not, but not everyone has bought a new video card in the last six months. To someone with, say, a Radeon 9800 XT, perhaps the jump in performance has now gone from "not worth it" for a 6800 Ultra to "hey, that's a big step up". Similarly, the X800 was a worthwhile upgrade to someone with a Radeon 8500, but possibly not to someone with a Radeon 9800 XT. People buy when there's enough of a performance difference to make it worthwhile to them, and with tech always advancing sooner or later your day will come.
There is a lot of difference in power consumption and heat between the Radeon 9200 vs. the 6200. The 9200 is basically a Radeon 8500, but built on a smaller die size, to reduce heat and power, and underclocked compaired to the 8500. This leads to very little heat and power use. While the 6200 is not the glutton that the 6800s or x850s are, it still requires lots of power and a large heatsink.
um, Direct3D? OpenGL? Nobody, strictly speaking, targets any video card. They target specific APIs, and it's up to video card vendors to cater to those APIs. Just because NVIDIA is the only card today to support Shader Model 3.0 doesn't mean that vendors writing games for SM 3.0 are only supporting NVIDIA. Just means that ATI doesn't support SM 3.0 yet, but their next gen chip will, and then those games will run the same code as the NVIDIA cards do. :P