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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."
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.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
Can you spot which one makes this card a hit?
._Windows XP/XP 64/ME/2000
._Built for Microsoft Windows Vista
._Linux
._Macintosh OS X
Operating Systems
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."
And Dusk and all those others? I recall that it was made to work on ATI stuff, but how about Linux? Anyone ever get that working there?
and i'm really starting to regret not getting one - or having the money I should say.... They were 150 (incl shipping)... pretty sexy, needless to say they sold out before 6 am
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'd explain it in detail, but I might make a minor mistake, so here's the wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisotropic_filtering and I think it's just a way to allow textures to be viewed from almost sideways (like walls) without the "shimmering" effect or the blurryness of bilinear filtering.
Why does my post history abruptly stop? I want to laugh at the stupid things I posted as a kid.
ah, i see, by 'filtering' in this case you really mean 'sampling'
Off topic. I am looking for a video card to use with my machine, so that I can do video editing with Adobe Premiere/After Effects. Is there a difference between a graphics card for games and cards for video editing? This looks like a pretty good deal to me.
First you animate. Then you SUSPEND!!!
Seems like a good casual gamer card. Of course the NIC integrated with my MotherBoard (bought/built in January) has been good enough for my PC gaming so far.
Sub $200 is nice
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
It looks like this is another one in Nvidia's line that includes support for Macs as well as Windows machines on the same card. At least OS X is listed in the supported OS's. Hopefully they will continue to bundle firmware for both PCs and Macs on the same card, instead of trying to gouge Mac users. Way to go Nvidia.
What about the only benchmark that matters: glxgears?
Listening for the sound of the coming rain...
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
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Actually, according to the article it can be had online for $179 after a $20 mail in rebate at most places. The XFX overclocked version is the one that runs about $220, or $200 after a $20 mail in rebate.
I think $184.75 qualifies as "sub-$200", though the tax would put it over $200. Tax is part of what you pay, but not part of the price to the vendor.
yes, filtering is technically correct. sampling is more
connotative. thanks for your insight.
Why is the submitter only pimping the HotHardware review? Here's more (in no particular order):
HardOCP
Guru3D
Anandtech
Bjorn3D
PCPerspective
nV News
I have a geforce 6800 GT which i purchased around this time last year. Would it be so much to ask that they append reviews of older cards, 1 or perhaps 2 years back, so that we can see where our cards would rank in relation to the new shit? I would really like to know if there has been a significant performance increase so that what is now a budget card, could outperform my one year old highend card.
If any reviewer is reading this please please put more context in the form of older models into your reviews. Comparing them against the current mid/high range cards does nothing for someone who doesnt obsessively follow video card benchmarks.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
I'd rather spend $200 on a graphics card like this than $600 on a console. My money is on Toshiba's HD-DVD being the industry standard, not Blue Ray. $175 for the Wii wouldn't be too bad though. They should just put the Wii on an internal PC card and cut the price $100 if they want to sell more games. Sony is obviously under the delusion that the whole world will wait on PS3 because the Japanese have boycotted the "foreign devil's" Xbox 360. They're wrong. People will be buying some combination of Xbox 360's, Wii's, PC upgrades or new PC's this Christmas, not waiting on the overgrown console and the new betamax of DVD to arrive.
The best motherboards for nVidia cards are the ones with nForce 4 chipsets. Those also have a NIC and a sound device built in. Linux support is no problem either.
Your complaint of "relevant content" may be due to you posting in the wrong discussion.
Just not at the same time as DDR. ASRock site And besides, if you already have DDR and then you buy this board, you're no more "stuck" with DDR than you were before you bought it.
It's a terrific board at an incredible price. The only reason I didn't buy one is that it's reportedly tough to install current Linux versions on it.
For me, the next card I select will be chosen more for the availability & functionality of open source drivers, rather than the raw speed of the chip itself.
I've just spent too much time trying to configure a Matrox G550 and a Nvidia Quadro 280 to deal nicely with dual-head. Both are busted with recent releases (6.8, 6.9) of Xorg.
Anyone care to explain - in english - what pixel and vertex shaders are? The wikipedia article ain't very clear.
A friend of mine bought this card from Woot! for $150. It got shipped in a brown box and was allegedly Dell overstock. He had to take a leap into darkness because nobody at the time was allowed to benchmark the thing, but now it looks like a pretty good purchase!
But are they going to release linux drivers with support for accellerated H.264 decoding any time soon? I don't care how many polygons per second these cards can shift, but accelleration of stuff I actually do, such as playing video, would be very worthwhile.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Sheesh I must be getting old! I understood sentences 1 and 4 in that!
Question : will it do gvim OK?
Atheism is a non-prophet organisation
Infact, going off this logic, you could say "sub-$X" where X is one cent more than your target price. Selling a product for $499.99? it's sub-$500. $328.43 ? Well, it's "sub-$328.44"
> so where is the arbitrary cut-off for "sub-$200" then?
10% (or even 5%) works fine.
Who the heck pays tax? Shipping maybe...
I had an unmodified GT7900 from evga. It froze up when I ran 3dmark 2006 on it (the deep freeze scene in particular hard locked the system.) The new card has different memory, and a better cooling system. I'm not OC'ing the card, as I like quiet performace over speed.
Needless to say, if you read the eVGA forums (or other forums for PC builders) this was a huge problem for people running at stock speeds.