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NVIDIA GeForce 7900GS Benchmarked
Spinnerbait writes "NVIDIA has launched another salvo of more competitively priced graphics cards, this time hitting the sub-$200 mark. The
new GeForce 7900GS is built on a 90nm fab process with 20
pixel shaders and 7 vertex shaders. The end result is that just about any
medium to high res gaming situation can be handled with high levels of
anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, while maintaining more than acceptable
frame rates. Best of all, you can actually purchase a card in retail
today, so this is no paper launch."
With tax in most places, it's over $200.
This how these things work though. If they wanted to price it at $150, they would set the actual price at $149 and say that it's priced at "sub-$150."
Try the ASRock 939dualSATA2, has an AGP and PCI-E slots. its cheap.
Isotropic = Identical in all directions. An = a prefix meaning not, so anisotropic means something that is directionally dependant. With respect to filtering of computer graphics, it deals with textures that are off angle to the camera. If a texture is facing the camera (screen) it is easy to scale up and down in size and thus scale off to the distance. However if something is off angle, such as the ground, it quickly gets blurry in the distance with standard bilinear or trilinear filtering. Thus anisotropic filtering. When enabled, card perform special filtering on off angle textures that makes them much more clear.
It is a very pleasing effect, however it does require some power to do and thus can slow down higher end games.
Bad idea. Motherboards the support both AGP and PCIe slots end up underperforming in both. I had an article explaining why, but I can't seem to find it. This one does a good job of explaining how PCIe works may mention AGP PCIe combo mobos. http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/pc ie.ars
Demented But Determined.
I am confused by this. Is it Nvidia's decision for OSX to support a new card, or Apple's? In the past, Apple's high quality control has in part been a result of targeting only selected hardware.
Umm, actually in the past video cards did not support Macs for two main reasons. First, they often used ADC, which pulled power for the monitor as well as the video feed and which required extra work to support the power requirements. This has not been the case in the last several revisions of all macs. Second, the macs use EFI or OpenFirmware instead of BIOS, meaning the video card needed to support all three types of firmware. Older Nvidia cards did not support OpenFirmware which Apple used on PPC macs. Now that Apple is using EFI, Nvidia has released a couple of cards that use the DVI connector now standard on macs and which has firmware for both BIOS and EFI in the same ROM. It marketed them as video card blah for Mac and PC. Presumably, this card is continuing that beneficial trend.
The more Mac hardware resembles PC hardware, the more manufacturers will be offering Mac-compatible products. Are they automatically welcome to do so, or can Apple say, "sorry, if you put that in your case it's no longer a Mac"?
Apple is pretty open about letting anyone plug anything they want into macs and as far as I know have never locked out anything in OS X, except motherboards. As far as I know, Apple has never refused to bundle the drivers for any devices pre-installed in OS X, but should they not want to do so, the user would simply have to install them from an included CD or download.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that Apple was holding back video card manufacturers, but as far as I know, that has never been the case. ATI and Nvidia have both had Mac offerings for a long time, often with nothing more than a different ROM and clock speed, and at half again the price of the PC version.
Not true. Check out this review of the ASRock 775Dual-VSTA. The PCI Express Slot is limited to 4X, and it underperforms other PCI-E motherboards by as much as 10%, but it's usually closer. AGP performance is actually slightly better. It's one of the most affordable Core 2 Duo motherboards out there, and it can even use your old DDR400 RAM.
Why is the submitter only pimping the HotHardware review? Here's more (in no particular order):
HardOCP
Guru3D
Anandtech
Bjorn3D
PCPerspective
nV News
Techarp has a great comparison between just about every major video card ever from just about every major video card maker ever. The 7900GS included. The format of the comparison (images) is terrible since you can't search through, but it is a pretty sweet chart. The comparison is more a technical one than a performance one, so take it with a grain of salt, but here are the results for a few cards.
c k____Core_Speed___Memory_Bandwidth
_ __450mhz_________42.2_GB/s
_ __400mhz_________32.0_GB/s
_ ___350mhz_________32.0_GB/s
_ __500mhz_________16.0_GB/s
Name_of_Card____Vertex_Pipelines___Textures/Clo
GeForce_7900GS________7______________20________
GeForce_7800GT________7______________20________
Geforce_6800GT_________6______________16_______
GeForce_6600GT________3______________8_________
On this site there are a lot of other important stats - memory clockspeed, pixel shader version, bus speeds & interfaces.
PS Sorry for the fugly formatting
The review at Anandtech includes benchmarks against cards going back to the 6600/6800 era.