Lets talk about the benchmarks that we saw in the previous few pages
Doom 3: From the previous generation of cards, Doom 3 always preferred nVidia cards to ATI’s and the GeForce 7800 GTX simply widens the gap between the high end ATI and nVidia cards with differences between 27-39%. Compared to nVidia’s previous generation 6800 Ultra card, we see the GeForce 7800 GTX deliver performance that’s upto 34% faster which is certainly impressive. However, we do see the 6800GTs in SLI mode perform faster than a single GeForce 7800 GTX in Doom 3.
Far Cry: Looking at the two GPU intensive demos we tested, the Archive demo shows the 7800 GTX performing upto 41% faster than the X850XT while the Volcano demo shows differences upto 25%. This is quite impressive considering that the X850XT performed better than all previous nVidia cards in these demos. Comparing to the 6800 Ultra, the 7800 GTX shows an improvement of up to 48% in the Archive demo and 45% in the Volcano demo while the 6800GT SLI setup scores between 3% to 28% slower in the Archive demo and upto 17% slower on the Volcano demo.
Half Life 2: This has always been ATI’s baby but that didn’t stop the 7800 GTX on walking all over it. In demo5 we see the 7800GTX performing upto 27% better than the X850XT while demo6 shows the 7800 GTX is faster by upto 20%. Compared to the 6800 Ultra, the 7800 GTX performs upto 42% faster in demo 5 and 43% in demo6. The 6800GT SLI doesn’t take as bad of a defeat where we see the 7800 GTX faster by upto 14% in demo5 and 16% in demo6
UT2004: This is where the bomb drops. Where the X850XT was faster than all nVidia cards in the past, the 7800 GTX trounces the X850XT by upto 42%. One of the problems with UT2004 in previous generation vVidia cards was that these cards took a big hit when anti-aliasing was enabled. Looks like nVidia overcame that as we see the 7800 GTX scores that are over 70% faster than the 6800 Ultra as well as the 6800GT SLI setup.
Looking at the performance results posted by these games, its quite clear that nVidia has made some major performance improvements to their new card. We’re guessing that the performance will only get better in SLi mode and hope to have that covered sometime soon as well. One more that that we’re quite impressed with is that the 7800 GTX actually runs very quiet (24dB), cooler and consumes lesser power than the 6800 Ultra card. In fact, the single slot solution that we received from nVidia posted temperatures around 47 degrees idle and 55 degrees on load. To put things in perspective, the single slot 100W power consuming 7800 GTX is faster than 6800 Ultra SLI which consumes 220W power and takes four slots - pretty impressive.
The moderate temperatures helped the card overclock nicely as well. We were able to run all benchmarks at 540MHz Core and 1.37GHz memory speeds which resulted in an almost thousand point jump in 3D Mark 2005. We did notice some clipping here and there and thus settled for 500MHz core and 1.35GHz memory for rock stable performance.
While we like everything we see, one thing that we feel is a bit on the extensive side is the price of the product- nVidia is pricing the 7800 GTX at $599. Now this might sound like a deal to someone whose running an SLi setup with 6800GTs, but for the rest of us, its way too much. We think nVidia might have some problem with this price range because the 6800 Ultra has an MSRP of $499 which will have to go down for the 7800 GTX to be priced less. This might just happen considering this is the “GT?version of the card and if nVidia plans on releasing an Ultra version. The good news is that for people who have deep pockets, the 7800 GTX is available as of RIGHT NOW.
Summing things up, nVidia has the fastest graphics card available at the moment and its SLI compatible. On the ATI side, we will hopefully see their CrossFire solution soon, however, keep in mind that this will be implemented using ATI’s X8x0 series which, as we saw from benchmarks in the previous pages, is almost 40% slower in higher-resolutions with AA and AF enabled in almost all the games. Until ATI offers their next generation GPU which has no firm date as of yet, it’s nVidia’s that’s in the game.
