NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX Performance Preview

Specifications

NVIDIA CineFX 4.0 Shading Architecture

8 Vertex Shader Units

Support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Vertex Shader 3.0

Displacement mapping

Geometry instancing

Infinite length vertex programs

24 Pixel Shader Units

Support for DirectX 9.0 Pixel Shader 3.0

Full pixel branching support

Support for Multiple Render Targets (MRTs)

Infinite length pixel programs

Next-Generation Texture Engine

Accelerated texture access

Up to 16 textures per rendering pass

Support for 16-bit floating point format and 32-bit floating point format

Support for non-power of two textures

Support for sRGB texture format for gamma textures

DirectX and S3TC texture compression

Full 128-bit studio-quality floating point precision through the entire rendering pipeline with native hardware support for 32bpp, 64bpp, and 128bpp rendering modes

64-Bit Texture Filtering and Blending

Full floating point support throughout entire pipeline

Floating point filtering improves the quality of images in motion

Floating point texturing drives new levels of clarity and image detail

Floating point frame buffer blending gives detail to special effects like motion blur and explosions

430MHz Graphics Core

256MB/256-bit GDDR3 at 600MHz

NVIDIA® Intellisample™ 4.0 Technology

Advanced 16x anisotropic filtering (with up to 128 Taps)

Blistering- fast antialiasing and compression performance

Gamma-adjusted rotated- grid antialiasing removes jagged edges for incredible image quality

Transparent multisampling and transparent supersampling modes boost antialiasing
quality to new levels

Support for normal map compression

Support for advanced lossless compression algorithms for color, texture, and z-data at even higher resolutions and frame rates

Fast z-clear

NVIDIA® UltraShadow™ II Technology

Designed to enhance the performance of shadow-intensive games

NVIDIA® SLI™ Technology

Patented hardware and software technology allows two GPUs to run in parallel to scale performance

Scales performance on over 60 top PC games and applications

NVIDIA® PureVideo™ Technology

Adaptable programmable video processor

High-definition MPEG-2 and WMV9 hardware acceleration

Spatial-temporal de- interlacing

Inverse 2:2 and 3:2 pull-down (Inverse Telecine)

4-tap horizontal, 5-tap vertical scaling

Overlay color temperature correction

Microsoft® Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) supports multiple video windows with full video quality and features in each window

Integrated HDTV output

Composited Desktop Hardware Engine

Video post-processing

Real Time desktop compositing

Accelerated antialiased text rendering

Pixel shader driven special effects and animation

Advanced Display Functionality

Dual integrated 400MHz RAMDACs for display resolutions up to and including
2048x1536 at 85Hz

Dual DVO ports for interfacing to externa l TMDS transmitters and external TV
encoders

Full NVIDIA® nView® multi-display technology capability

0.11-micron manufacturing process
302 million transistors
Peak power consumption 100W-110W
MSRP $599.99

Notes

As you can see, for GeForce 7800 GTX, NVIDIA has increased the number of pixel and vertex units, up from 16 pixel pipelines in GeForce 6800 Ultra to 24 in GeForce 7800 GTX, and six vertex units in the 6800 Ultra up to eight in GeForce 7800 GTX. Despite this, NVIDIA is adamant that the GeForce 7800 GTX is more than just higher clock speeds and more pipes, with enhancements made to the pixel and vertex units, as well as a new texture engine designed to accelerate texture processing. We’ll go over the changes NVIDIA has implemented on the following pages.

AGP users should note that GeForce 7800 GTX is only being offered in PCI Express form only, at least that’s NVIDIA’s sole offering initially. When asked about the possibility of producing an AGP variant of the GeForce 7800 GTX, NVIDIA emphasized that their HSI bridging technology could be adapted for the 7800 GTX, leaving the door open for an AGP-based 7800 GTX card. NVIDIA’s reference 7800 GTX board also ships with 256MB of memory, but that doesn’t mean an enterprising board partner couldn’t release a 512MB card.

NVIDIA made it clear that the technology could easily scale to 512MB, but at $600 for a 256MB card already, a 512MB 7800 GTX board would be priced well out of reach of most consumers. Considering the lackluster benchmarks we recently saw with a 512MB GeForce 6800 Ultra, board partners may want to wait until more applications are designed to take advantage of the additional memory.

On an entirely unrelated note, the GeForce 7800 GTX features 3Dc support, according to NVIDIA “applications using 3Dc compression format will transparently work on the GeForce 7800 GTX”.

Also, NVIDIA's tech demos are much better this year than last time, both technically and artistically. In fact, they did everything Alan suggested a year ago in this editorial. It's a good side-read if you have time, but a relevant quote:

[A good tech demo] should not be a demo that is left running in the background in a continuous loop like NVIDIA's Dawn. There should be an introduction, middle, and end. People should say 'That was a cool, I want to see that again' as opposed to 'I've seen enough, show me the next demo.' Don't dwell on a particular camera shot to show off the 16-pass shader that took months to code if the scene flows better cinematically with a quick cut -- make the end user want to watch the demo again to get that second glimpse at that effect.