nVidia's reborn 7900GTPast year, I'm speaking of the year 2005 AD, nVidia released their newest DirectX 9 video accelerator cards based on their G70 GPU. The 7th generation nVidia gpu was first thought to be not a big jump forward regarding the architecture, but the final results spoke for themselves. The 7800GTX came back early 2006 with a fresh new name and a more efficient/smaller core. The 7900GT was born offering 7800GTX processing power for less money. NVidia's newest king of the hill, the GeForce 7900GTX, used the same core and rolled out of the factory at much higher frequencies... the G71 is a successful die shrink. The release of the 7950 GT prove this, here are some specs:
| GeForce 7800GTX | GeForce 7900GT | GeForce 7950GT | GeForce 7900GTX |
Productionprocess | 110nm | 90nm | 90nm | 90nm |
Pixel pipelines | 8 | 8 | 8 | 8 |
Vertex pipelines | 24 | 24 | 24 | 24 |
ROP's | 16 | 16 | 16 | 16 |
GPU core clock | 430 MHz | 450 MHz | 550 MHz | 650 MHz |
Memory clock | 1200 MHz | 1320 MHz | 1400 MHz | 1600 MHz |
Amount of memory | 256Mb | 256Mb | 512Mb | 512Mb |
Memory bus width | 256 bit | 256 bit | 256 bit | 256 bit |
Between the launch of the 7800GTX past year and now nVidia has made a significant upgrade on the core clock as well as for the memory clock. As the other main parts did not change you will see that the 7950 GT gained a big performance boost over the original 7800GTX. The best thing is that the 79x0 GT is a mid-end product, where the 7800 GTX was meant for high-end users. Another good thing is that nVidia kept a single slot cooler and that it might be possible that the 7950 GT is less power hungry due to the 90nm process (even with the higher core/memory clocks applied).
7950GT specificationsNVIDIA® CineFX® 4.0 Shading Architecture Vertex Shaders
- Support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Vertex Shader 3.0
- Displacement mapping
- Geometry instancing
- Infinite length vertex programs
Pixel Shaders
- 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
Delivers true high dynamic-range (HDR) lighting support
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
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™ Technology1
Patented hardware and software technology allows two GeForce-based graphics cards to run in parallel to scale performance and enhance image quality on today's top titles.
NVIDIA® PureVideo™ Technology
Dedicated on-chip video processor
High-definition H.264, MPEG2 and WMV9 decode acceleration
Advanced spatial-temporal de-interlacing
Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
High-quality video scaling
Video color correction
Microsoft® Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) supports multiple video windows with full video quality and features in each window
Advanced Display Functionality
Dual integrated 400MHz RAMDACs for analog display resolutions up to and including 2048x1536 at 85Hz
Dual-link DVI capability to drive the industry's largest and highest resolution digital flat panel displays up to 2560x16001
Integrated HDTV encoder provides analog TV-output (Component/Composite/S-Video) up to 1080i resolution
Full NVIDIA® nView® multi-display technology capability
High Speed Interfaces
Designed for PCI Express x16
Designed for high-speed GDDR3 memory
NVIDIA® Digital Vibrance Control® (DVC) 3.0 Technology
DVC color controls
DVC image sharpening controls
Operating Systems
Windows XP/Windows XP 64
Built for Microsoft Windows Vista
Windows 2000
Linux
Macintosh OS X
API Support
Complete DirectX support, including the latest version of Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0
Full OpenGL support, including OpenGL 2.0
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