NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT reviews - tech
(hx) 05:16 PM CEST - Aug,11 2005
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NVIDIA today introduced and announced
immediate
availability of the Company's new NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT graphics processing
unit (GPU). The 7800 GT offers near-GTX performance for at least a hundred bucks
less than NVIDIA's top-end card, and it pretty much creams anything else in its
price range.
TheTechLounge:
NVIDIA's reference 7800 GT features 20 rendering pipelines, a core clock of 400
MHz, and a memory clock of 500 MHz (1 GHz DDR) while the reference 7800 GTX
features 24 rendering pipelines, a core clock of 430 MHz, and a memory clock of
600 MHz (1.2 GHz DDR). However, XFX (like many other vendors) overclocks even
the standard versions of these cards, with their 7800 GT core clocked to 450 MHz
and the memory pushed up to 525 MHz (1.05 GHz DDR).
Guru3D: Just like the 7800 GTX the GT will need a pretty spiffy CPU. 3.4
GHz Pentium 4 or a rather sizable AMD64 Athlon 3400+ to get the most out of it's
capacity, such a processor at minumum I really must recommend. Even with our
Athlon 4000+ testing rig we ran into CPU limitation here and there. That's does
not mean games run like rubbish though, oh of course not. They are way up there
in the highest ranking scores and performance. Yet the graphics card can go
faster then it's allowed by the CPU. The CPU simply isn't presenting data fast
enough to the graphics card driver. Even a game like Half-Life 2 will run into
that limitation if you turn off stuff like AA and AF and then measure in
1024x768. Of course you'll have incredible framerates and let me emphasize this
again, at blazing speeds.
TechReport: So, like I said at the outset, the card is fast, and it's
less expensive than the GeForce 7800 GTX. The performance differences between
the two were narrowed a little bit in our testing because we used an
"overclocked in the box" GeForce 7800 GT and a stock-clocked GTX. Even so, I'd
have a hard time finding the justification for spending an extra hundred-plus
dollars on a 7800 GTX now that the 7800 GT has arrived. None of these cards are
cheap, but the 7800 GT is easily a better value than its pricier sibling. Either
card will get you the full feature set of NVIDIA's G70 GPU, and the performance
delta between them isn't huge.
HotHardware: With its 20 pixel pipelines, 7 vertex units, and 256MB of
1GHz RAM, the GeForce 7800 GT performed very well throughout our entire battery
of benchmarks. And with its support for Shader Model 3.0, and excellent
anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering quality / performance, the GeForce 7800
GT also has superior in-game image quality. Its relatively quiet single-slot
cooler is another plus, as it the 7800 GT's full support for NVIDIA's SLI
multi-GPU technology.
HardOCP: Battlefield 2 performance was also very strong on the BFGTech
GeForce 7800 GT OC. We found we could play with the maximum in-game quality
settings at 1600x1200 with 2X TR MSAA. The GeForce 7800 GTX was faster in this
game allowing 4X TR MSAA with a single card. Battlefield 2 is a very bright
game, taking place outdoors, and there is a lot of vegetation, which can look
pretty nasty if not Anti-Aliased. The BFGTech GeForce 7800 GT OC allows you to
have Transparency Multisampling Anti-Aliasing enabled at every resolution to
help eliminate the aliasing. With two cards in SLI, the performance is there to
allow the absolutely best image quality of Transparency Supersampling at 4X at
high resolutions.
PC Perspective: In most cases in our benchmarks we found the 7800 GT
card at reference speeds beating out the best ATI card on the market, the X850XT
Platinum Edition. This is bad news for the Canadian chip designer as NVIDIA
already has one model above the GT with the GTX and could come out with another
faster unit any time it wants to.
VR-Zone:
This card could not really be unlocked, using the latest version of Rivatuner
(RC15.6), available. The issues we faced is this: right after we ticked to
enable the disabled pipes, a restart is required for changes to take effect.
However, upon rebooting of windows, we saw the progame's main page listing the
card, still at 20x1pp / 7vpp. This means it had not been unlocked at all.
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