TeAM YYePG

TECH
PC GEEKS ARE SPLIT INTO THE RED
Camp (ATI) and the Green Camp (Nvidia), > each staunchly defending their choices in
graphics cards. For now, Nvidia’s latest graphics
juggernaut, the GeForce 7800 GTX, is king of the
hill when it comes to raw power. But at a cost of
around 600 bones, all the pixel shaders in the world
can’t save it from being an expensive add-on.
BY THE NUMBERS
Nvidia is quick to point out that the 7800 GTX architecture
isn’t a simple product refresh or tweak of
the GeForce 6800 Ultra—the vertex and pixel shader
pipelines have been completely redesigned. But,
since the core feature set is pretty much the same
and the only differences are performance characteristics
and power utilization, it’s easiest to understand
the new architecture in comparison to the
previous one. The 7800 has only 10 percent more
memory bandwidth and the same pixel fill rate, and
78 > COMPUTER GAMING WORLD
MANUFACTURER: Nvidia
PRODUCT: GeForce 7800 GTX
Videocard
runs at a mere 5MHz higher clock speed. The interesting
parts are the 50 percent increase in pixel
shader pipelines, from 16 to 24, and the 33 percent
increase in vertex shader units.
With just 10 percent more memory bandwidth,
how does this GPU hope to be significantly faster
than the 6800’s NV40 architecture? Nearly every
part of the graphics pipeline has been tweaked,
redesigned, or overhauled for greater efficiency.
The 7800 GTX card draws about 100 watts, compared
to 110 for the 6800 Ultra. Better still, the reference
cooling solution is single slot and runs much
more quietly—no leaf blowers here, which is great
news for those building high-performance systems
into smaller cases.
FUN WITH BUZZWORDS
One of the 7800 GTX’s big bullet points is what
Nvidia calls Transparency Adaptive Anti-Aliasing filtering.
TAAA is aimed at improving the image quality
of textures with alpha (transparency) data.
Current anti-aliasing methods smooth out most
onscreen jaggies, but they can’t handle objects like
chain-link fences that have “clear” spots where
you’re supposed to see between the links. Nvidia’s
new solution provides anti-aliasing to the links of
those chain-link fences (or any other object with
transparency in the textures).
However, we should point out that the 7800 GTX
doesn’t really do anything new to improve standard
anti-aliasing modes. The cards are still limited to 4x
multisample AA, plus the 8xS mode, which combines
4x multisampling AA with 2x supersampling.
The multisample pattern hasn’t changed at all—it’s
still the tried-and-true rotated grid pattern used in
the last generation of GeForce cards. Nvidia
promises a boost to 16x AA, which will be a combination
of 4x supersampling and 4x multisampling,
> It’s
I
king of the hill
when it comes to
raw power.
but it’s not in the initial driver release. The company
promises a driver update soon that will enable this
new mode, possibly only on SLI systems.
Basically, the main goal of the 7800 GTX is greatly
improved performance. This new architecture is all
about making existing and upcoming games run
much faster, especially those that use floating point
textures and HDR rendering, like those using Unreal
Engine 3.
THE TEST RUN
So how did the 7800 GTX stand up against the
current crop of games? Maybe it was because we
had a fully loaded Athlon 64 FX-55 (2x512MB
DDR400 RAM and ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe
NUCLEAR POWER
Nvidia GeForce 7800 GTX, brought to you by
Making Sense of 3DMark05
3DMark05 is the quintessential synthetic benchmark
for testing gaming hardware. It’s primarily a
graphics-focused test suite that utilizes DirectX
9.0cwith Pixel Shaders 2 game tests, and features,
batch, and CPU tests. The final score
reflects a combination of graphics and CPU loads
at 1280x1024 resolution with 2x antialiasing and
4x aniostropic-filtering enabled.
3DMark05
WORST
1,904
�
GeForce 7800 GTX
NEW
BEST!
7,678
HOW OUR GRAPH WORKS We graph a
product’s benchmark scores to demonstrate
how it compares to the scores of other products
we’ve reviewed in the last six months. During
that time, the lowest 3DMark05 Pro score we’ve
seen is 1,904; the highest was 7,275, until now.
�
BENJAMINS
ALERT
As of press time, the 7800
GTX is the fastest card
on the market.
Time to smash open
the piggy bank!
motherboard), but the 7800—as expected—cut a
bloody path through our tests. The 7800 GTX has 50
percent more pixel shader pipelines and a third more
vertex shader pipes, so it’s unsurprising that its
scores in 3DMark05 scores are roughly 50 percent
higher than the 6800’s. And this is with 1600x1200
resolution, as well as 4xAA and 8xAF turned on. It
goes without saying: The new GPU also outstrips
ATI’s best by quite a margin.
As for real game tests: It’s hard to believe, but it’s
Far Cry—not Doom 3 or Half-Life 2—that shows we
still have plenty of need for more powerful graphics
cards. A single 7800 GTX is about 25 percent faster
than the 6800 Ultra, and 15 to 20 percent faster than
the X850 XT PE. Is that enough to make the game
CPU bound? Hardly. Two 7800 GTX cards in SLI
show there’s still plenty of headroom left, so long as
you run at a render state higher than 1280x1024
without AA or AF.
Bottom line, Nvidia has unquestionably produced
the fastest videocard to date—at least until we see
what the big deal is with ATI’s upcoming next-generation
architecture, code-named R520. Unfortunately,
this unprecedented speed comes with an unprecedented
price tag: GeForce 7800 GTX cards are
expected to cost $599. With GeForce 6800 Ultra
cards selling for under $500 now, we can’t really say
that the 7800 GTX represents much of an improvement
in value. Basically, only three types of people
will own these cards: the rich, the hardest of hardcore
gamers, and tech editors. But if you’ve got the
green and you want to run at high resolutions with
anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering all the time, it’s
worth a look. /Jason Cross
GeForce 7800 GTX $600
Nvidia focuses on speed and delivers
it in spades, but at a price that means
many gamers won’t be able to enjoy it.
VERDICT