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."

Comments

no AGP :(

[Ubergrendle]

Given that this discount/budget card is intened for more casual gamers, its too bad there's no AGP version forthcoming. I suspect I'm in the same boat as many Slashdotters, having a hard time justifying the replacement of an 18 month old motherboard + cpu just to get PCI-Express -- especially since X2 AMD cpus are just now coming to the end of manufacturing.

I'm a dedicated ATI user, but I'd buy the best price/performance card for if someone was still supporting AGP.

Re:no AGP :(

[Dr. Eggman]

I am facing the same thing. Although, I've finally decided that I'm going to try Core 2 Duo over AMD's X2 when I upgrade. I was hoping to hear an announcement about the GeForce 8800GT and 8800GTX first, though. Supposidly, announcements about it and its support of Directx 10 (I hope) are coming out this or next month. Until I hear news on the 8800 series, I'm holding off upgrading. Hopefully, I can upgrade and get my PCI-x, dual core, Directx10 and Vista also supported in one fel swoop. So far, as long as I'm moderate with the CPU and skip the on board video, its shaping up to be about 1000-1100 (minus Vista, but why subtract 0? ;) All this hinges, of course, on the 8800GT being price in line with prior releases...

Reliability?

[ewhac]

The 7900GT and 7900GTX were one of the most problematic graphics products NVidia ever released. There were hundreds of reports of cards that would display a garbage desktop, lock up or, most commonly, display "exploding triangles", all of which would seem to point to RAM data corruption somewhere. These failures even happened to people who were not overclocking their cards at all. The issue was so bad that one card vendor apparently shut down its customer comment fora to forestall any further reports of problems (I won't say who since I didn't independently confirm it).

There has been tons of speculation on what the cause might be (excessive heat, bad batch of RAMs, signal integrity problems, bad/weak power supplies, too-close-to-the-edge memory timings), but no concrete explanations from anyone.

I personally bumped into this. I built a brand new rig for myself about four months ago, and gave it an NVidia 7900GT made by eVGA. It wasn't long before stuttering graphics and exploding triangles showed up. Happily, eVGA were very committed to their product, and cross-shipped a replacement which, so far, has worked almost entirely without incident. It's my understanding that customers of competing board vendors have not been so lucky.

So whenever I see a review of the latest NVidia product, I'm afraid my first question is no longer, "How fast is it?" but, "How reliable is it?" I think burn-in tests should become a standard part of a reviewer's benchmark suite.

Schwab