Geforce 7800 GTX

The months have flown by without the release of any ground breaking technology in the graphics market. Now is the time for the release of the Geforce 7800 GTX with the G70 core. Nvidia say that this next generation graphics card has been built from the ground up, meaning that the designs and production has been from scratch. They have not simply alter some sections of previous designs for a performance boost.

Keeping inline with the development of recent technologies, the card will be released only in PCI Express format and will have SLI capabilities. PCI Express is quickly becoming the standard for all graphics cards and Nvidia are making more and more of their card SLI compatible. The Geforce 7800 GTX takes the pixel pipeline count to 24 meaning 24 pixels can be processed per clock cycle allowing for a greater throughput and allowing for greater frames rates.

Features of the Geforce 7800 (G70)

Card comparison

As you can see there is a very modest increase in the core and memory speeds from the Geforce 6800 ultra. So Nvidia hasn't gone down the road of simply pumping up the power of the Geforce 7800 GTX. The small increase of core and memory speed has given a very small increase in memory bandwidth as well but nothing to really shout about.

Geforce 7800 GTX

So lets have a quick look at why the Geforce 7800 GTX does perform so much faster than the Geforce 6800 Ultra with having a massive speed increase. Firstly as we mentioned earlier the pipeline count has been bumped up to 24 this gives the Geforce 7800 GTX tremendous pixel pushing power to get those frame rates higher when in a high resolution mode. Gaming seems to be moving closer to 1600x1200 all the time. The rest well its hard to describe but the Geforce 7800 GTX is simply more efficient. It takes up less power than the Geforce 6800 Ultra but produces better results. This will probably be due to the length of time that Nvidia have had to refine and produce this card as its been over a year since the previous release. The Geforce 7800 GTX has the ability to use HDR (High Dynamic Range) This is a technology that allows the graphics card and supporting games to use advanced colour and lighting. Contrast is displayed as a perspective. Lights seem brighter when you are in the dark, move into the light and the same object appears to be slightly darker (or not as bright really). More realistic lighting scenes can be achieved by calculating the lighting ratio between the objects in focus and surrounding light sources. The Geforce 7800 offer HDTV support as well as all the old favourites such as FSAA and Anisotropic Filtering.

Variants of the Geforce 7800 (G70)

As well as the Geforce 7800 GTX there is also two more card in the 7800 range. The GT version is a cut down version and will feature less of the high end units in the card. There will also be an Ultra version which inevitably will be clocked higher than the GTX version with all the features still enabled. Both these card will be based around the original Geforce 7800 GTX. Pricing will be set accordingly.

PCI Express

The Geforce 7800 GTX will be released in PCI express format. There are currently no plans to release the graphics card in a AGP bus format but we do know that Nvidia have the capability to create a hardware bridge to allow this card to run on AGP 8x motherboards should they decide to go down that route.

PCI Express is the new bus system for graphics cards and other devices, the PCI Express bus should eventually replace the AGP bus and the standard PCI bus. PCI express is a serial bus system which means data flows in one line behind each other. The original PCI bus was a parallel system which could send multiple streams of data at once. This sounds like a step backwards but the Serial Bus can be clocked much higher than a parallel one. On top of this the New PCI Express bus can be split into channels each with its own data stream. Graphics cards will have a standard of 16 PCI express (PCI 16x) channels for high speed data flow where as simple devices will only require 1 PCI Express channel (PCI 1x)

For more information on PCI Express read our article here

SLI (Scalable Link Interface)

As we expected SLI is an option of the Geforce 7800 GTX. SLI is the technology that allows you to use two of the same type of cards together to get some real power for your graphics intensive games. SLI does quite give twice the power but certainly make a worth improvement. But the true beauty behind SLI is the easiness to upgrade later on. You simply buy one Geforce 7800 GTX now and when you feel you need more power further down the line you can purchase another one. Buy this time of course the price of the Geforce 7800 GTX will be much lower and you will be able to have as much power as the next GPU for less money. Genius.

For more information of the new SLI see our article here

Video Outputs

The outputs on the card will are 2 DVI's and 1 HD output. Supporting Dual TFT monitors and CRT monitors with an adapter.

Full Chipset Details

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