A little over a year has passed since releasing the GeForce 6800, and right on cue, NVIDIA’s new chip is hitting town in the form of the GeForce 7800 GTX. The formerly codenamed G70 marks a breakaway from NVIDIA’s previous NVxx naming scheme, and is a leap into its seventh generation of video cards.
 
For comparison’s sake, the standard 6800 Ultra has a 425MHz core clock speed with 256-bit GDDR3 memory modules running at 1100MHz.The 7800 GTX has a tiny 5MHz increase on that, with a core clock at 430MHz and a relatively decent 300MHz increase in memory speed to 1400MHz, also with 256-bit GDDR3 modules. These numbers aren’t that much of a leap, however it’s in the pipelines where the magic is. The 7800 GTX has twenty-four pixel pipelines and eight vertex shaders.
 
One technological update that particularly grabbed our interest was a neat addition to antialiasing (AA). In the past, AA hasn’t smoothed over the edges of transparent textures, as they only looked for the edges of geometry, not alpha channels. ‘Transparency AA’ is now an option within the drivers, and textures that have an alpha channel can now have the jaggies smoothed out too.
 
On Test 

For real-world performance, we loaded up Doom 3 and the results were startlingly good. We may have hit a bottleneck, but this proves the card is in deed nothing to be sneezed at. Particularly given that at 1600 x 1200, with one card, it performs on par with two 6800GTs in SLI. The performance slightly decreased in SLI mode, with a single GeForce 7800 GTX card spitting out barely a frame faster, but as we mentioned, this could be due to a software or testbench bottleneck. Suffice to say, the results are astounding and high resolutions is where it pulls ahead.
 
Finishing up on 3DMark05, we finally saw the 10,000 3DMarks barrier smashed down, with AA barely affecting the performance, thanks to multi/super-sampling.
 
Even though this is an engineering sample, the fan noise was so quiet we had to push our ear almost right against it to hear it. Running two of these is of little concern to the ears, as they’re quieter than two 6800GTs.
 
With the heat of ATI’s CrossFire in the sights, it will be very interesting to see how they stack up against each other. Currently, all of NVIDIA’s SLI cards must be exactly the same brand, right down to the BIOS version in order to function correctly, if at all. On the other hand, the CrossFire will be capable of supporting completely different cards, making the upgrade possibility much easier down the line. Considering that BIOSs are updated fairly regularly, finding a card that has the exact same BIOS a year or so from the date of purchase is no easy task. Rumour abounds, however, that NVIDIA may soon lift the restriction, in response to ATI, no doubt.
 
Overall, the GeForce 7800 GTX is the most powerful card we’ve come across to date. It will be interesting to see what additional features the manufacturers have to offer with this workhorse, as that will be the decision maker in choosing one over another. If you want the fastest card available right now, the GeForce 7800 GTX should be hitting the shelves by the time you read this.