The NVIDIA GeForce 7900 Series

An anonymous reader writes "HardOCP has posted their evaluation of the new GeForce 7900 technology. They fully cover widescreen gaming this time around too. 'NVIDIA has worked hard to try and produce a more powerful, albeit power-efficient GPU in the 7900 GTX and GT, and they've succeeded. They run cooler; are smaller, have less transistors, and they don't make you stuff cotton in your ears. The 7900 GTX and GT are just more efficient while being lightning fast.'"

and the heat

[Amouth (879122)]

i bet with the SLI i can still cook two eggs at once. :)

Re:and the heat

[Knight Thrasher (766792)]

If you read the article, you might've caught that these cards run cooler, thanks to 90nm.

Please read the article. The 7900 is an actual step forwards from the 7800. In this article, Nvidia delivers.

I'm interested to see what ATI is going to do. I'm not a fanboy of either manufacturer, but the 7800GT/GTX and the GS series have been laying into ATI hard, and they still havn't released a card that matches the 7800 series yet. I'd like to see something comparable, just so the prices are driven down a little on these higher-end cards.

Re:and the heat

[Pope (17780)]

Yeah, encoding MP3s at 0.9x was awesome.

You have a choice when you buy a computer, and you could buy one that was cool, but you obviously didn't, so stop whining about it.

Re:and the heat

[PFI_Optix (936301)]

Yeah, but you can't watch movies on a furnace.

Re:and the heat

[TubeSteak (669689)]

Yeah, but you can't watch movies on a furnace.

Two words: Shadow Puppets

Re:Actually...

[Woy (606550)]

And the Laptop based solutions can roast a sausage to accompany those eggs ands biscuits.

Re:Actually...

[Schnapple (262314)]

And the Laptop based solutions can roast a sausage to accompany those eggs ands biscuits

But only for guys that keep it on their lap.

More Sources, no karma whoring

[by Anonymous Coward]

http://www.amdzone.com/modules.php?op=modload&name =Sections&file=index&req=listarticles&secid=13 [amdzone.com]

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2717 [anandtech.com]

http://www.guru3d.com/article/Videocards/326/ [guru3d.com]

http://pcper.com/article.php?aid=213 [pcper.com]

http://techreport.com/onearticle.x/9529 [techreport.com]

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/03/09/ati_and_nvi dias_same_day_mega_launch_mayhem/ [tomshardware.com]

Hurray, Another "Review"

[eldavojohn (898314)]

And yet another graphics card is released. Is it worth my money to upgrade my dual 6800 XTs? Let's find out by reading the review.

Unfortunately, I can't. I'm better off going to NVidia and trusting their product sheets. Why? Because I'm not looking to play Need for Speed Most Wanted or Quake Four or Half Life Two, I'm looking to do some actual graphics processing with an SLI setup. Yes, brace yourselves, I don't actually use these beasts for gaming.

If you read the reviews, it may look like these cards have no purpose other than to play the higher end games.

It is my responsibility to make a kind of "Google Earth on Steroids" for my employer. And this requires that five (yes, five) terabytes of mapping data be available for a multi-monitor (and by "multi" I mean many) display. What's my current choke point? Simply data bandwidth into the card.

Where does this review leave me? I now know intimately how high I can get my frame rate up in a first person shooter. Huzzah!

I know there are product sheets that tell me what kind of bandwidth I have but I'm more interested in what a non-interested third party has to say about it. Where are the real benchmarking tests? What about a simple program that loads up the card with as much data as possible as quickly as possible? I'm not even sure if the choking point is on the card or at the interface level with the motherboard (PCIe 16x).

Why can I not find objective reviews that aim to look at cold hard numbers?

Re:Hurray, Another "Review"

[shaka999 (335100)]

Maybe you should try some decaf or something. So your using a product outside its target market and now your whining because your not getting the info you need. Face it 99.5% (prove me wrong :) ) of people who buy these use them for games. Get over it.

So look up the card for your job

[Sycraft-fu (314770)]

Namely, the Quadro. The GeForce series are their gamer cards. That's their target market, well at least with the higher end ones. Hence, they send them to gamer sites and they get reviewed for gamers. nVidia's professional line of cards are the Quadros. They are the same chips as the GeForces, but use different drivers, certified for pro apps, and have features available not found on consumer cards like HDSDI output.

Now if you feel like saving money by getting the gamer card instead of the pro one, I don't have a problem with that, however don't get angry that everyone else taks about it and reviews it as though it were a gamer card since, in fact, it is. If you want a card taht's treated like a pro card, look at a Quadro.

Re:So look up the card for your job

[TubeSteak (669689)]

You used to be able to cheat by flashing the BIOS of the regular cards with the BIOS of the Quadros.

The bold could have even more fun by soldering/breaking the SMD-resistors on the PCB. Ditto for ATI cards.

I don't know if this applies to the lastest gen of graphics card, but it is/was a cheap and easy way to get the pro driver/bios optimizations without the extra on-card features.

Re:So look up the card for your job

[Deliveranc3 (629997)]

Wait wait, I know where he's coming from. I'm in the market for a beat up sedan to grow pot in but none of the review sites show what frequencies the roof lights put out.

Lousy auto industry.

You should see nethack on this thing..

[saboola (655522)]

Where as the main character looked like this before (screenshot below):

@

Now on this new video card it looks like this:

@

best 500 bucks I have ever spent

Radeon X1800 GTO Review

[by Anonymous Coward]

To combat the new GeForce 7600 GT and GeForce 7900 GT, ATI just launched the new Radeon X1800 GTO. The only review [hothardware.com] I can find so far is at Hot Hardware.

Who cares, really

[TheSkepticalOptimist (898384)]

I get tired of the constant barrage of newer and faster video cards on a 6 month cycle. Most people can't afford $700 for the latest video card, so its like 12 months before these video cards become feasible for the average user to consider in their new system, and by then a newer faster $700 video card has already come out.

The problem is, with each generation of video card, full of hype and claims of high performance, wait 6 months and a video game is usually released where it cripples the card. I have an x700 video card and, while not the x800, it was still in a generation of video cards that can play the newest games at the highest resolutions with the best quality settings. Playing F.E.A.R I can barely get 30 fps out of the card with minimum to medium quality settings, that on a video card not more then a year old.

Video cards are one of those products that are sold for way too much money when it is first released. I mean, nVidia and ATI may think it is necessary to jack up the cost to cover R&D investment, but how much R&D is really going on? With the 7900, nVidia just looked to shrink some of the components and optimize existing architecture, something they have been doing consistently with the Geforce lineup. Are they spending billions in R&D, or just millions? Do they need to sell new cards for $700, or perhaps can we start seeing a price war that will drive down costs of new products to reasonable prices.

In any case, so what, nVidia has a new lineup of video cards. Add that to the list of literally hundreds of available video cards on the market, with 16 versions of every model and generation by 16 different companies, the video card market has become muddy and overly complicated and I just don't care when something new enters the market now because it won't run the games well that I want to play 6 months from now, and I don't have $700 burning a hole in my pocket every 6 months to buy the next latest and greatest.

Re:Who cares, really

[ArsonSmith (13997)]

You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of Capitalism. It is consumers that set the price. NVIDIA just asks, "Who will pay this much for this card?" Once sales drop they drop the price and again ask, "who will now pay this lower price?"

At some point the Video cards will hit a price point that you find worth your money.

Re:XBOX 360

[Knight Thrasher (766792)]

PCs already surpass the XBox 360 in graphics. It's just the nature of the console beast. Don't get me wrong, I'd like to be able to afford a 360 myself, but in terms of raw power, computers win every time. Now, simplicity and ease of use...

Re:XBOX 360

[cvd6262 (180823)]

While I agree with the other respondant - that simplicity is inversely correlated with featureset - I was turned off by the Xbox 360 demo I saw at the store. It went something like this:

Click the game I wanted to see...
Wait...
Get the developer logos...
Wait...
Get the instructions...
Wait...
Select character...
Wait...
Watc^H^H^H^H Skip intro movie...
Wait...

After 45 seconds of waiting for the game to load, I forgot why I was even playing.

I mean, UT2004 didn't take that long to get me into a game on a 600MHz laptop.

Re:XBOX 360

[MyNameIsEarl (917015)]

On the PC version all you need to do is rename all those movie files in the correct directory, another reason I will never own a console. (Mods being the main reason)

Re:XBOX 360

[Austerity Empowers (669817)]

PCs have had better graphics than the XBox 360 for several years. Consoles always lag.

Countable v. Uncountable

[Venner (59051)]

In English, the word you use depends on whether the thing you are describing is countable or uncountable. If English isn't your first language, that is the best way to think about it. Native speakers, of course, don't stop to think about it (and often get it wrong, for that matter :-) )

Some examples:

Countable:
A cow
"I have three cows"
You can see individual cows; you can't divide a single cow into other cows.

Uncountable:
Water is uncountable*
You don't say "I have waters" (unless you are being strangely poetic)
instead, you say "I have some water."
If you divide up some water, each piece is still just "water".

How does this affect language?
"I have many cows, and I have much water."
"I have few cows. I have little water."
"I have fewer cows than Michael. I have less water than Michael"

Hope that helps.

*Water itself is uncountable, but you can count the quantities it is in.
"I much water" vs. "I have many litres of water"

Re:Countable v. Uncountable

[Ford Prefect (8777)]

In English, the word you use depends on whether the thing you are describing is countable or uncountable. If English isn't your first language, that is the best way to think about it.

Or if you're a programmer, think of it as floats and integers. Perfect!

(Yes, it would appear English is strongly typed, unless you explicitly cast using a metaphor...)

Re:But which card to get?

[Creepy (93888)]

that in itself is a touchy subject - the common designations nVidia gives are
Ultra and GT - better than the standard card
LE, GS - low end/discount version (GS is sometimes better, depending on age of the original card) of the original card.

x extension (gtx, fx) was for a while PCI-X, but they've since dropped it.

you may also see TC, which stands for Turbo Cache. You'll find that on low end cards.

You will sometimes see GS cards that are more expensive than GT cards, but I've never seen a GS card that is better than a GT card, so I suspect that's a volume issue (pricewatch has some 7800GTs that are cheaper than GS's). It may be onboard memory, but I doubt it. The GTs are usually the same card as the GS, however (so you may be able to unlock the features nVidia shuts off).

Completely Wrong

[default luser (529332)]

Just because you THINK there is some purpose in Nvidia's naming scheme doesn't mean there actually IS any purpose.

Take the GeForce 6 series, for example:

Within the first six months of release, Nvidia had laid-out a very simple set of cards (in performance order):

6800 Ultra
6800 GT
6800

6600 GT
6600

6200
6200 TC

Now, they had this great arrangement of performance levels, where all the cards within a lower numbered range were slower than the cards in the next higher numbered range. but like any company they had to deal with inefficiencies in their production processes, and try to keep their brands fresh. Thus, many cards were added to fit small but profitible niche or OEM markets.

So, by the end of 2005, you had a whole mess of cards. Some of them were added to compete with ATI, others were added to deal with yields (and had disabled pipes), while still others were introduced to replace a product that was "old" with something easier to make.

The mapping, in true performance, of all GeForce 6 chips, end of 2005:

6800 Ultra
6800 GT
6800 GS (Added as a reduced-cost replacement to 6800 GT)
6800 GTO (Added in response to ATI's x800 GTO)
6800
6600 GT
6800 XT
6800 LE
6600 DDR2
6600
6500
6600 LE
6200
6200 TC

See how confusing that became? It's just a natural progression, and ATI does the same thing. The 7 series is already beginning to see the effects of the naming scheme madness. Once Nvidia transitions fully over to the 7 series, expect the same product fragmentation to occur.

Oh, and I must correct you on this:

x extension (gtx, fx) was for a while PCI-X, but they've since dropped it.

Do you mean PCIe?

Incorrect. The FX series (GeForce 5) was entirely AGP. Board makers later released versions of the FX series with PCI-e bridge chips so they could dump their stock as "PCIe" cards.

The 7800 GTX is the only card EVER MADE by Nvidia to wear the "GTX" monkier. The 7800 GTX is PCIe, but so is the 7800 GT...see the problem with your assertion?