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XFX Geforce 7600GT Fatal1ty - Cooler and Faster than others

Videocards/VGA Reviews by geoffrey @ 2007-01-12

With the official release of the NVIDIA G80 based high end video cards in November last year, it is only a matter of months before we see new mid-range mayhem released for every budget minded gamer out there. At the very last moment XFX decided to satisfy gamers with one of the last G70 based video cards, their 7600GT Fatal1ty edition features passive cooling and faster clock speeds at a competitive price. How much faster? We find out.

Technology - 80nm vs 90nm

NVIDIA's Technology: G73

Madshrimps (c)

The XFX GEFORCE 7600 GT FATAL1TY is based on NVIDIA's G73 core. This 80nm 7 series GPU comes with 12 out of 24 pixel processors and 5 out of 8 vertex processors enabled. The unused pipes are not baked on this GPU causing the total amount of transistors to fall back from 302 million to approximately 170 million. Combined with the new 80nm production process, this XFX 7600GT is a very good candidate for passive cooling.

	GeForce 6800GS	GeForce 7600GT	XFX 7600GT Fatal1ty	GeForce 7800GTX
Productionprocess	110	90	80	110
Pixel pipelines	12	12	12	24
Vertex pipelines	5	5	5	8
ROP's	12	8	8	16
Core clock	425 MHz	560 MHz	650 MHz	430 MHz
Memory clock	1000 MHz	1400 MHz	1600 MHz	1200 MHz
Amount of memory	256	256	256	256
Memory bus width	128	128	128	256

XFX equipped their 7600GT Fatal1ty with 256Mb (4x64Mb) synchronous data rate Dynamic RAM from Samsung. The K4J52324QC-BC14 high performance memory chips provide bandwidth up to 7,2Gb/s and offers programmable frequencies and latencies. This device's normal operating voltage is at 1.8V (+0.1/-0.1V), XFX runs the GDDR3 memory chips at 1,9V which allows them to use this memory 100MHz higher then Samsung's maximum rating (800MHz > 700MHz).

Architecturial features:

NVIDIA® 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

Comment from SuAside @ 2007/01/12

i kinda miss a X1950Pro thrown into the mix... (and a real case

)

Comment from jmke @ 2007/01/12

X1950Pro is out the 7600GT league, the 7900GS is the X1950Pro match which Geoffrey compared earlier here: http://www.madshrimps.be/gotoartik.php?articID=523

Comment from Massman @ 2007/01/12

I really like the card's specs, 80nm should be one good overclocker

Comment from jmke @ 2007/01/12

SusAside, you might have a point, the X1950Pro performs quite on par with the 7600GT in this review: http://www.trustedreviews.com/graphi...1ty-7600-GT/p4

Comment from HitenMitsurugi @ 2007/01/13

Depends on what graph and game you're looking at, and what the bottleneck in the system is

upping res/AA gives you this:
http://www.trustedreviews.com/images...924-graph9.gif

Which is another extreme case, i know, but just as valid. The problem is that they don't mention the system test configuration
If you look at how cs:source scales, you see a big cpu bottleneck at 1280x1024, with all the cards performing the same, and only some spacing apart as the resolution increases. If you'd only look at that one resolution, you'd draw the wrong conclusions.

and the price difference isn't that big, in germany u can find x1950pro's for €165 for the bog standard cards, but a more general pricerange is €180-200

edit: ah yes they do: "To test I used our standard selection of benchmarks in our reference Intel 975XBX “Bad Axe” motherboard, with an Intel X6800 Core 2 Duo, coupled with 2GB of Corsair CMX1024-6400C4 running at 800MHz with latency settings of 4-4-4-12." Strange that even that processor bottlenecks these mid range cards.

Comment from SuAside @ 2007/01/13

well, it might be 35 euros more expensive, but it's still ATI's best mainstream card (price/performance). a comparison with that is always educational i'd say (and a good reference).

Comment from jmke @ 2007/01/13

the 7600GT is competitor to X1650XT in fact, as seen in this review: http://www.madshrimps.be/vbulletin/s...ad.php?t=29022

unfortunately Geoffrey changed test configs, so he couldn't reuse the numbers of his X1950Pro tests, the cards have been since send back to companies.

Comment from flokel @ 2007/01/28

Can somebody tell me how high the 7600gt fatality is ?

I'm worried if the card fits in my silverstone lc-16m

regards,
Flo

Comment from geoffrey @ 2007/01/30

Height
Zalman HD135 ---> 135mm
Silverstone LC-16M ---> 170mm

XFX 7600GT Infin1ty ----> +-150mm

Should fit in there.

Comment from jmke @ 2007/07/10

* Cheapest "stock" 7600 GT is now only €79
http://www.alternate.de/html/product...wTechData=true
* The Fatality version is only €119
http://www.alternate.de/html/product...wTechData=true

* Cheapest "stock" 8600 GT €99
http://www.alternate.de/html/product...wTechData=true
* OC'd XFX 8600 GT €119
http://www.alternate.de/html/product...l?artno=JAXXHB
* XFX Fatality 8600 GT €149
http://www.alternate.de/html/product...wTechData=true

will be interesting to compare these cards, don't ya think

will be testing them the coming week; shown down of NVIDIA low/mid end

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