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."

Comments

Price Point Comment

[dannyitc]

Quoted from anandtech:

One of the most impressive aspects of this launch is that the part is available now. I mean right now. Order it today and plug it in tomorrow. That's right, not only has NVIDIA gotten the part to vendors, but vendors have gotten their product all the way to retailers. This is unprecedented for any graphics hardware launch in recent memory. In the midst of all the recent paper launches in the computer hardware industry, this move is a challenge to all other hardware design houses.

ATI is particularly on the spot after today. Their recent history of announcing products that don't see any significant volume in the retail market for months is disruptive in and of itself. Now that NVIDIA has made this move, ATI absolutely must follow suit. Over the past year, the public has been getting quite tired of failed assurances that product will be available "next week". This very refreshing blast of availability is long overdue. ATI cannot afford to have R520 availability "soon" after launch; ATI must have products available for retail purchase at launch.

I would assume one of the reasons the price point is higher is the fact that this card was pushed to retail much faster than either nvidia or ati has been able to do before. I would suspect that, given an amount of time comparable to the normal lag between launch and having the card available on shelves, the price will be more comparable to launch prices we're accustomed to seeing.

Need more power...

[Duncan3]

100 watts... joy.

Someone needs to build a card that draws single digit wattage and will drive 2048x1536 displays, and they will sell loads of them. I cannot be the only one sick of the jet engine noise and space heater performance.

Ya know, like an Mac Mini, only with high resolution.

Stagnation is what we need!

[rAiNsT0rm]

This is precisely what is wrong, we need stagnation so that developers can actually focus on and utilize a video card. In the current state NONE of the features of current cards are being utilized properly.

Ever notice how it takes a year or so for console games to really begin to shine? This never happens because in 14 months 8-10 cards have come and gone. If there was some standardization and a slowdown the industry could focus on content rather than FPS in a two or three year old game that doesn't utilize ANY of the new cards features.

The FX line of cards had the ability to be great but needed to be programmed for directly, and because of trying to cover ATI and other vendors none of the cool features ever saw daylight (remember the cloth/trasparency demo's)

I know ATI and Nvidia will never try to standardize, nor will they slow the flow of cards with small increases in actual performance at high prices, but if they would PC's could actually get utilized to their fullest potential (hell this 7800gtx TURNS OFF TRANSISTORS to save power, just showing how under-utilized and un-needed they truly are)

Same for Game consoles, standardize, build them into consumer electronics... sell in quantity with less marketing, R&D, and loss and sell billions of games. It is a win/win for hardware manufacturers and developers... just as soon as people wake up.

Nividia Solid

[augustz]

Lots of somewhat bogus postings.

The 7800 performs significantly better than 6800. In fact, reading through the (many) reviews that all popped up with NDA's expiring, in higher res / anti-aliasing a single 7800 is beating dual 6800's SLI. Of course, choice of benchmark affects these results, but it does look like a generational increase in speed.

In addition, it uses LESS POWER. No one seems to be mentioning this, but these cards suck up rediculous amounts of power. This bodes well for cheaper versions.

And cheaper versions are going to be coming, this release is for the insane gaming crowd that is already spending $1k on SLI setups. The price/value at this point is not the point, it is just about how fast you can go.

ATI feels like they are a generation behind to me. They are coming out with first gen SLI, first gen Shader 3, while Nvidia is already on their second spins.

The key of course is when they release their next gen part (and by this I mean actual retail volume, not a paper launch). In six months another cycle of cards will be coming through, so one has to be careful to compare apples to apples.

Plus of course there is the nice AMD64 and Linux support (not perfect, but good) from Nvidia. Bottom line, will wait to see the ATI part, and how available it actually is, before singing its praises.

Re:This is the PS3 GPU for sure

[rAiNsT0rm]

I understand what you all are saying, but this is basically the heart of the PS3. It is what was running at E3, and no one would put that much effort into developing for a temporary vid card (especially the Unreal engine). Nothing major is going to be different between this and the RSX, just small tweaks... otherwise the transistor count wouldn't be similar nor the featureset.

Sony needs the price to be reasonable, these will be stable in production by then and even if there are slight differences in production the major core will be the same. The costs will be down and this will indeed be basically the heart of the PS3. HDR, transparency, AA/AF, all these will be what the PS3's new titles utilize. Any variation from the 7800GTX to the RSX will be minimal.