Introduction

Remember back in the days of the original GeForce 256 how everyone was wondering when the first games would take advantage of the GeForce 256’s hardware-based transformation and lighting (T&L) engine? Likewise, it was well over a year before the first DirectX 8 games came along for the GeForce 3. In fact, the GeForce 4 was launched nearly a year after the GeForce 3 without a single DX8 app to take advantage of its DX8 architecture outside of a few tech demos and benchmarks such as 3DMark 2001 and Code Creatures. With its pixel shader 1.4 support, ATI’s RADEON 8500 ushered in DX 8.1 graphics with nary a title to take advantage of it.

The same thing occurred for the RADEON 9700 PRO in 2002. Gamers eager to see what all the fuss for DX9 was about really had to wait nearly two years for Far Cry (although the initial release of that game was largely based on DX8 shaders as we reported to you back in April of 2004, follow-up patches added additional DX9 shader support), as the first crop of DX9 games was a joke. Anyone remember Gun Metal? Didn’t think so.

XFX GeForce 7800 GTX XXX sits below the NVIDIA 7800 GTX 512MB reference board

The 7800 GTX 512MB alongside GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB

XFX GeForce 7800 GTX XXX and RADEON X1800 XT 512MB

Fortunately, things changed for shader model 3.0. NVIDIA’s been very aggressive at seeding developers with the tools and hardware to add shader model 3.0 support to their titles in development (and even existing games, as we saw with Painkiller and Far Cry) and now that’s really paying off. We’re now just over a year after the first shader model 3.0 hardware was released, and already dozens of games are on shelves that take advantage of the technology. In fact, we’ve even got graphically-intensive games like F.E.A.R. and Call of Duty 2 that are capable of bringing the latest high-end graphics cards to their knees. We’re talking sub-30 fps frame rates here. Just take a look at our GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB Performance Preview article. Chris evaluated F.E.A.R.’s performance with the latest $1,000+ CPUs and found that the game was entirely graphics-bound. Regardless of the CPU used, dual-core or not, performance was limited entirely by the graphics card used, not the processor. Drop in a faster graphics card (or SLI) and you get better performance, otherwise its all relative.

With this in mind, many of you are probably looking for a new graphics card upgrade to tide you over with the latest crop of games. On the high-end, NVIDIA’s GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB is as good as it gets right now thanks to its whopping clock speeds: 550MHz on the graphics core (which is 120MHz higher than the 256MB GeForce 7800 GTX) and 850MHz on the memory (an improvement of 250MHz over the 7800 GTX 256MB).

The 7800 GTX 512MB dwarfs the reference 6800 GT 256MB in size

High-end cards

But what if you want performance that’s even greater than NVIDIA’s stock speeds for the GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB? That’s where XFX’s GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB DDR3 XXX Edition comes in!