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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."
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.
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.
Why is the submitter only pimping the HotHardware review? Here's more (in no particular order):
HardOCP
Guru3D
Anandtech
Bjorn3D
PCPerspective
nV News
The review at Anandtech includes benchmarks against cards going back to the 6600/6800 era.