NVIDIA's Tiny 90nm G71 and G73: GeForce 7900 and 7600 Debut

The Competition

ATI has been very aggressive as of late, and we have been quite happy with what we have seen so far. After their circuit design setback with the X1800 last year, ATI really turned things around and offered the X1900 lineup in rather quick succession. Before today, the X1900 was clearly the king of the hill in all things graphics. With the new RD580 chipset from ATI offering 2x x16 PCI Express slots, Crossfire is looking better than ever as well. The comparison at the high end is very exciting: it's never been a better time to be a graphics enthusiast with tons of excess money.

At the same time, the midrange is heating up as well. With prices on the X1600 looking good, the new pressure on NVIDIA from ATI's upcoming X1800 GTO (which we unfortunately don't have), and solid products like the 6800 GS and 7800 GT already out there, the 7600 GT is a welcome addition in price/performance.

So we can get a good idea of what we will be working with, we are providing tables comparing the features of the high end cards and mid range cards we will be testing from NVIDIA and ATI. CrossFire and SLI will be looked at as well.

NVIDIA Graphics Card Specifications
	Vert Pipes	Pixel Pipes	Raster Pipes	Core Clock	Mem Clock	Mem Size (MB)	Mem Bus (bits)	Price
GeForce 7900 GTX	8	24	16	650	800	512	256	~$500+
GeForce 7900 GT	8	24	16	450	660	256	256	~$325
GeForce 7800 GTX 512	8	24	16	550	850	512	256	$600+
GeForce 7800 GTX	8	24	16	430	600	256	256	$450
GeForce 7800 GT	8	20	16	400	500	256	256	$300
GeForce 7600 GT	5	12	8	560	700	256	128	~$200
GeForce 6800 GS	5	12	8	425	500	256	256	$180

ATI Graphics Card Specifications
	Vert Pipes	Pixel Pipes	Raster Pipes	Core Clock	Mem Clock	Mem Size (MB)	Mem Bus (bits)	Price
Radeon X1900 XTX	8	48	16	650	775	512	256	$600+
Radeon X1900 XT	8	48	16	625	725	512	256	$500
Radeon X1600 XT	5	12	4	590	690	256	128	$150

We will also be including SLI and CrossFire setups for these cards in all cases but for the X1600 XT. Unfortunately, during testing one of our X1600 cards decided to roll over and die (such is the price of working with engineering samples and prerelease products). The other card we would love to have included is the X1800 GTO which has 12 pixel pipes and is clocked similarly to the X1800 XL. As we mentioned previously, ATI didn't get a card to us for testing.

For our comparison, we have decided to test all applications with 4xAA and 8xAF in all tests but Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. For Splinter Cell we are testing with SM3.0 options enabled and AA disabled as the game doesn't allow both to be set while playing. With all of this power available, our opinion is that AA is worth enabling in just about any situation. The visual quality benefit, even at high resolutions, is well worth it.