Introduction

After kicking off the DX9 era with a lackluster start with their ill-fated NV30 GPU, NVIDIA’s execution the past twelve months has been nearly flawless. The GeForce 6800 series launched on time, and while availability on higher-end cards was a little spotty at first, NVIDIA’s retail supply problems with GeForce 6800 Ultra were nowhere near as severe as ATI’s with RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition. Enticing gamers further was NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 GT.

Although this GPU wasn’t initially in NVIDIA’s playbook for the GeForce 6800 family, it ultimately captured the hearts and minds of many consumers looking to upgrade. The card’s excellent feature set, high clock speeds (the GeForce 6800 GT’s core was only clocked 50MHz lower than GeForce 6800 Ultra), and aggressive pricing made it a tempting upgrade for gamers looking to get the most bang for the buck. Even if they couldn’t afford it, it was the card many NVIDIA enthusiasts aspired to one day own. In many ways, NVIDIA recaptured the spirit of their highly successful GeForce4 Ti 4200 with the GeForce 6800 GT. This DX8 card can still be found in many gamer’s systems to this day.

The EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GTX and X850 XT PE reference card

EVGA 7800 GTX meets GeForce 6800 GT reference board

NVIDIA’s superlative execution continued into the summer and fall with the GeForce 6600 and GeForce 6200 series of GPUs. The GeForce 6600 GT delivered performance greater than the first generation of high-end $500 DX9 cards (the RADEON 9800 XT/9700 series) for a fraction of the price, bringing new levels of performance to the mainstream segment, while the 6200 brought shader model 3.0 to the value market. GeForce 6200 TurboCache cards for example can be found for well under $100.

Meanwhile, on the platform side, NVIDIA introduced nForce4 SLI. The concept is simple: combine two graphics cards together to get nearly double the performance. While SLI got off to a somewhat slow start at the end of 2004, with only a few motherboard partners onboard and only a few dozen titles supported, the technology has rapidly taken off since then. Now nForce4 SLI motherboards can be found from multiple manufacturers and at price points below $150, while NVIDIA claims SLI support for roughly 80 titles, with more on the way. It was largely thanks to SLI that NVIDIA was able to weather the storm when ATI announced their R480 and R430-based VPUs, such as the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition and RADEON X800 XL: while a single GeForce 6800 Ultra was generally outgunned by the RADEON X850 XT PE (with a few notable exceptions such as DOOM 3 and Chronicles of Riddick) the X850 XT PE was no match for two GeForce 6800 GTs or 6800 Ultras running in SLI mode.

ASUS GeForce 6800 Ultra and EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GTX

The EVGA board poses with the 6800 GT and 6800 Ultra

The only real hiccup NVIDIA encountered last year was PureVideo. This feature ultimately never found its way into the GeForce 6800 family, running best on the GeForce 6600 instead.

Now NVIDIA’s introducing their next-generation part, GeForce 7. The first GPU based on this technology is the GeForce 7800 GTX. And for the first time that we can remember in quite some time, retail cards were available at launch, EVGA was the first company to send us one of their boards for review, and guess what – it runs even faster than the 7800 GTX reference board we tested a few week ago!