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:Nice, but no thanks.

[Nos.]

How many fps does you NIC get?

Re:Mac Support

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

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.

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