The sixth
generation of NVIDIA graphics products was a great success
that saw the company quickly recover from the previous
generation disaster. Their partners are happy and the sales
figures are clearly the reason for this. With minimal chip
shortages, NVIDIA has done well to cover the majority of the
market segment with a range of new products.
Currently, ATI offers a bigger range of
PCI Express graphics cards when compared to NVIDIA. However,
this is not to say the ATI products are out right better,
quite the contrary really. There has been no way to really
determine a winner as neither brand offers consistent
performance in all games. Past results have shown that
either company can shine in a particular game, for example
NVIDIA has proven to be the king of Doom 3.
The GeForce 6 series was built around
the NV4x architecture which has been carried through to the
latest generation. The core that has been codenamed “G70” is
the heart and soul of the new GeForce 7800 GTX graphics
card. This product is based on the NV4x architecture, yet
there have been a number of important changes made to
improve the product. These improvements include increased
clock speeds and more importantly bandwidth, thanks to the
additional rendering pipelines. There is also an extra two
vertex pipelines bringing the grand total to eight, while
this is not a feature that will greatly benefit users today,
it will certainly be a handy feature in the future.
Despite all the impressive features the
GeForce 7800 GTX has to offer, there is something else about
this card that I am far more impressed with and that is its
availability. The moment NVIDIA lifted the NDA on the
GeForce 7800 GTX, it was available for purchase everywhere.
This is highly unusual and NVIDIA really has done well to
achieve this. The ability to get products such as the
GeForce 7800 GTX, in large volumes to retailers instantly,
will give NVIDIA a great deal of leverage over ATI. This is
something ATI has struggled with in the past and it has cost
them dearly with their latest generation of products.
When push comes to shove, I often find
that Gigabyte is among the quickest to deliver products,
such as the GeForce 7800 GTX. This is obviously due to the
fact that Gigabyte is a tier-one manufacturer with a great
deal of resources at their disposal. Many years ago when I
found myself building my first computer, the shelves were
lined with Gigabyte products; from motherboards to graphics
cards, you name it. Not much has changed over the years and
Gigabyte is still one of the easiest to come by names in the
industry. They are also a highly respected manufacturer and
their reputation has continued to serve them well over the
years.
Before we move on, here is a quick
summary of the GeForce 7800 GTX. As mentioned, the card does
utilize 24 pixel pipelines, the core is clocked at 430MHz
with the GDDR3 memory clocked at 1200MHz. As I have
discovered when using GDDR3, it is highly overclockable,
meaning these cards should offer a great deal of
overclocking potential. Just like the Gigabyte GeForce 6800
Ultra, there is no physical difference in appearance from
the NVIDIA reference design. This is a little disappointing
as I was really hoping to see Gigabyte do something
impressive with their GeForce 7800 GTX cards.
Nevertheless, they still look impressive
and more importantly will only vacate a single slot in the
case. Furthermore, Gigabyte has most probably followed the
NVIDIA reference design to save on cost. After all, the
average GeForce 7800 GTX graphics card will retail for a
lazy
$650.
This means if you were to build a GeForce 7800 GTX SLI
system it would cost around
$1200-1300 just for
the graphics cards! This really is no different to GeForce
6800 Ultra pricing when these cards were first released; on
a positive note
SLI capable motherboards are now much more
affordable.
