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3 – GeForce 7600: NVIDIA has a history of delivering killer mainstream GPUs. After all, they’re the ones who really perfected the segment with the GeForce2 MX. The GeForce 4 Ti 4200 and GeForce 6600 lines were also highly successful mainstream GPUs -- in fact the GeForce 6600 held the number one spot in Valve’s latest hardware survey from November.

With such an established pedigree of mainstream cards, NVIDIA’s GeForce 7600 had some very big shoes to fill. Fortunately, the 7600’s G73 GPU delivered.

The GeForce 7600 is built around a 12 pixel shader architecture, with five vertex shaders and high clock speeds. It has only got a 128-bit memory interface, but the GeForce 7600 GT in particular is capable of outrunning NVIDIA’s prior generation flagship, the GeForce 6800 Ultra, even with AA/AF and other eye candy features cranked up. The most impressive part about the GeForce 7600 is its price: when it was launched, the 7600 GT was priced at an MSRP of $200. And for consumers who couldn’t budget a $200 graphics upgrade, the GeForce 7600 GS shipped with all the 7600 GT’s key features, only it shipped with slightly slower clock speeds and a $150 price tag. The 7600 GS could even run passively and was built with an SLI connector.






2 – GeForce 8800: Coming in a close second on our list is the GeForce 8800 GTX. NVIDIA’s GeForce 8800 is the world’s first DirectX 10 GPU, much to the chagrin of AMD/ATI. It also boasts a radically different architecture than previous NVIDIA GPUs.

The GeForce 8800 features a new unified shading architecture, with what NVIDIA describes as GigaThread and stream processing technologies. The GeForce 8800 is composed of dozens of what NVIDIA has dubbed stream processors, each stream processor can operate on pixel, vertex, physics, or geometry shading; each processor can also dual-issue a MAD and MUL instruction, and supports IEEE-754 floating-point. The stream processors run at speeds of up to 1.35GHz on the GeForce 8800 GTX. Like ATI’s R500 series, the GeForce 8800 splits the processing workload into thousands of independent simultaneously executing threads. NVIDIA doesn’t state exactly how many threads can be in flight at once, only to state “thousands”, GeForce 8800 does boast greater thread granularity than ATI however: 32 pixels versus 48.

The GeForce 8800 also features a wider memory interface than previous high-end GPUs from NVIDIA, with the 8800 GTX sporting a 384-bit interface with 768MB of GDDR3 memory running at 900MHz, providing up to 86.4GB/sec of peak bandwidth to the graphics processor.

As a result of all these changes, the GeForce 8800 delivers revolutionary performance. In our testing, a GeForce 8800 GTX delivered over two times the performance of NVIDIA’s fastest GPU from a year ago, the GeForce 7900 GTX; it also significantly outpaced the GeForce 7950 GX2, which combines two G71 GPUs on one graphics card.

Besides the redesigned graphics core, GeForce 8800 also is the first NVIDIA GPU to support 16x anti-aliasing (this was previously exclusive to SLI), as well as better anisotropic filtering and HDR+AA. To deliver improved visuals without the traditional performance penalty, NVIDIA has added a new coverage sampling AA mode. The goal with CSAA is to deliver near 16xMSAA-like image quality with performance levels closer to 4xMSAA.

The GeForce 8800 is also NVIDIA’s first GPU to boast 10-bit display output and it also delivers improved high definition video playback supporting both 3:2 and 2:2 pulldown (inverse telecine) of HD interlaced content as well as HD noise reduction and HD edge enhancement.

Because of all this, the GeForce 8800 is easily the most sought after graphics card right now. Unfortunately, it’s also prohibitively expensive, a trait which our number one product doesn’t share.