NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB: Upping The Ante
Introduction & Specifications
The launch of ATI's Radeon X1K family of graphics cards last month served multiple purposes. First, it allowed ATI to showcase their next-generation graphics hardware, well before the start of the holiday buying season. Something ATI needed to do after suffering from multiple delays. But it also served another purpose, one that wasn't quite so beneficial to ATI. The launch of ATI's Radeon X1K family of products also seems to have served as motivation to the folks at NVIDIA. Since the introduction of the Radeon X1K family of products, NVIDIA has released a series of new products, fleshing out various price points.
Over the last couple of weeks, NVIDIA introduced the new, budget-priced GeForce 6600 DDR2 256MB to combat the Radeon X1300 at the low-end. They have also released the GeForce 6800 GS to compete directly with the Radeon X1600 in the mainstream market segment, and Call of Duty 2 has been bundled with the GeForce 7800 GT to further entice prospective buyers. But today, NVIDIA is bringing out the big gun and releasing a new flagship product targeted squarely at ATI's Radeon X1800 XT.
In this article we'll be evaluating the new GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB. As its name implies, the GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB is a new version of the GeForce 7800 GTX with more frame buffer memory, but the new 512MB GTX differs from the 256MB version in a number of other ways as well. Read on to see was NVIDIA's got in store this holiday season...
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| 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 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 64-Bit Texture Filtering and Blending •_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 Digital Vibrance Control (DVC) 3.0 Technology •_DVC color controls •_DVC image sharpening controls NVIDIA SLI Technology •_Patented hardware and software technology allows two GPUs to run in parallel to scale performance •_Scales performance on over 60 top PC games and applications |
NVIDIA UltraShadow II Technology •_Designed to enhance the performance of shadow-intensive games NVIDIA PureVideo Technology •_Adaptable programmable video processor •_High-definition MPEG-2 and WMV9 hardware acceleration •_Spatial-temporal de- interlacing •_Inverse 2:2 and 3:2 pull-down (Inverse Telecine) •_4-tap horizontal, 5-tap vertical scaling •_Overlay color temperature correction •_Microsoft Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) supports multiple video windows with full video quality and features in each window •_Integrated HDTV output Composited Desktop Hardware Engine •_Video post-processing •_Real-time desktop compositing •_Accelerated antialiased text rendering •_Pixel shader-driven special effects and animation Advanced Display Functionality •_Dual integrated 400MHz RAMDACs for display resolutions up to and including 2048x1536 at 85Hz •_Dual DVO ports for interfacing to external TMDS transmitters and external TV encoders •_Full NVIDIA nView multi-display technology capability Advanced Engineering •_Designed for PCI Express x16 •_Designed for high-speed GDDR3 memory Operating Systems •_Windows XP / Windows XP 64 •_Windows ME •_Windows 2000 •_Linux •_Macintosh OS X
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The specifications listed above are ripped directly from our original article covering the launch of the GeForce 7800 GTX back in June of this year. Although the GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB is technically a "new" product, it is not based on a new GPU architecture. The GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB and GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB share the same core GPU, and as such they have the same feature set. Underneath their respective GPU coolers lies the same 302 million transistor G70 GPU. What sets the GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB apart from its 256MB counterpart, however, are its higher core and memory clock speeds, and of course its larger frame buffer.
