HEXUS.preview NVIDIA's GeForce 7800 GTX

[Nick]

You've seen the sneaky pictures, the early benchmarks and you've put up with all the hype. Now it's time for a proper look at NVIDIA's new GeForce 7800 GTX, in the labs. Rys gets down and dirty with a pair of these beauties, to see just what they can deliver.

All-in, a solid improvement to an excellent architecture. NVIDIA balance ALU increases with ROP considerations to create a formidable pixel pusher that currently has no equal. 7800 GTX boards can be bought from today for a UK retail price of £369. That's only some £70 more than a 6800 Ultra (15%), for a rough 40% increase in performance, should your wallet be up to the task.

Get the full, detailed testing and analsyis in our HEXUS.preview

[DrMips]

Thanks for the great review. You talked me into buying one. Ended up getting the XFX 7800 GTX pre overclocked to 450/1250. I pick it up Saturday. I could have picked it up today but I live in Spain and need to fly to the UK tommorrow. I was visiting the family anyway. I won't tell them how much it cost (£421.83 inc VAT by the way). Just need to find somebody stocking the A64 x2 Dual 4400.

[Rys]

I've made a couple of changes to the article this morning, based on some new information uncovered by B3D, relating to G70's support of ATI's 3Dc 2-channel compression format (normally used for normal maps) and the number of samples taken by the TAA algorithm.

Pages 2 and 12 are those affected by the new information.

[Rys]

Page 11 gets an update today, too. The 4xAA, 8xAF graph had ever so slightly incorrect numbers for the single 7800 GTX. The performance difference between it and the single 6800 Ultra is bigger than I first showed, and the article has been updated to reflect that.

Thanks to Tarinder for spotting it as we did some comparative testing together this morning.

[autopilot]

At this rate we could maybe even squeeze another generation of GFX card's out before the PS3 comes out. That will shut the PC Doom monkeys up

Nice review BTW. Any word on a '7600' type series?

[Rys]

G71 is likely to appear at the very far end of summer at the earliest. Autumn/fall is most likely, though.