NVIDIA Corp. unveiled Wednesday its latest graphics processor GeForce 7800 GTX, the fastest visual processing unit ever built so far. NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX graphics chip features 24 pixel pipelines, 8 vertex pipelines and consists of more than 300 million transistors, providing unprecedented specifications.

NVIDIA claims that their newest high-end offering is available for purchase in local shops on the day of the release which is very uncommon for top-of-the-line graphics cards offerings. As the proof of NVIDIAs?statement a huge number of reviews are available shortly after the launch.

?It's taken three generations of revisions, augmentation, and massaging to get where we are, but the G70 is a testament to the potential the original NV30 design possessed. Using the knowledge gained from their experiences with NV3x and NV4x, the G70 is a very refined implementation of a well designed part. With a max of three times the MADD throughput, 50% more pixel pipes, and 33% more vertex power than 6800 Ultra, the GeForce 7800 GTX is a force with which to be reckoned. Putting this much processing power into a package that pulls less juice from the wall than a 6800 Ultra is quite a feat as well. The 300+ million transistors fabbed on a 110 nm process are quite capable, and NVIDIA's compiler technology is finally mature to the point of handling all games with no shader replacement,?writes AnandTech.

?The GeForce 7800 GTX's GDDR3 memory is clocked at 600MHz (1.2GHz DDR) compared to the GeForce 6800 Ultra at 550MHz (1.1GHz DDR). As you can see, there isn't a large raw increase in memory bandwidth. Even though the memory speeds are not much faster on the GeForce 7800 GTX compared to the GeForce 6800 Ultra, this is ok if games start to become limited by the shader performance. Now, on the other hand, if games do start throwing out larger textures and more generated pixels, then memory bandwidth will have a large impact. As we move into the future, 512MB video cards will have more space available to game content developers and they may choose to fill up this space with large textures, in which case a lot of memory bandwidth could help. For the time being, NVIDIA has decided to concentrate on raw shader performance,?speculates HardOCP.

 ?In terms of features, the texture samplers attached to the fragment units are no different in G70, compared to NV40. However NVIDIA tell me that when fetching large textures in preparation for filtering, G70's samplers have less latency pulling those textures out of memory. So while fragment programs always seek to hide texturing latency since it's always much slower than a single cycle, there's less latency to hide with G70. The samplers still perform single-cycle bilinear filtering, two-cycle trilinear and up to 16X anisotropic (128-tap) filtering, just like NV40 does,?claims Hexus.net.

?The strongest aspect of the GeForce 7800 GTX is its pixel shader performance, like in Half-Life 2 and F.E.A.R. All games that emphasize the mathematical capabilities of the graphics processor have shown a tremendous speed growth over the solutions of the previous generation, namely GeForce 6800 Ultra and RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition,?concludes Alexey Stepin, graphics cards editor.

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• ExtremeTech: GeForce 7800 GTX: Nvidia's Nuclear Option.
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• The Tech Report: NVIDIA's GeForce 7800 GTX Graphics Processor.
• : NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX: New Architecture Exposed.
• : NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX: Monstrous Gaming Performance Unleashed.