Conclusion

G70 clearly isn't a massive departure from the architectural principles set down with NV40, but then there is little impetuous or requirement to make such a move at the moment. However, clearly G70 is a very effective extension on the architecture that was already laid out, with increases in performance not just through increased clocks and pipelines, but also some key alterations throughout the pipeline and some very useful additions to the Shader ALU's to make them more capable over each clock cycle. End users also have a little more in the way of image quality options to make use of with the inclusion of gamma adjusted FSAA options and the evidently effective Transparency AA support; it is, however, a little bit of a shame that Multi-Sample AntiAliasing isn't supported with floating point blending and filtering.

Whilst the performance increase for GeForce 7800 GTX over NVIDIA's previous high end is evident, at least where the applications is sufficiently graphics limited to show it, its good to see that NVIDIA have focused on the power side of things as well such that the increased in performance (and die size) isn't drawing as much power as 6800 Ultra at high load situations, and is able to scale down better during 2D operations. These power alterations have inevitably lead to NVIDIA only requiring single slot cooling as well which may make it easier to fit 7800 GTX is a wider range of systems, especially those with small form factors.

At present NVIDIA have only announced this GeForce 7800 "GTX" version. Over the coming months we expect that the product line will be fleshed out with other variants of the line, which we assume will include a standard 7800 and a GT version. One topic for discussion is that of the change of name for the high end product from Ultra to GTX, which has left many people wondering whether we will see an Ultra version when other competitive products are released - the fact that the board uses single slot, aluminium cooling certainly suggests that they could get better cooling with a dual slot fan, which should be an aid for higher yields at higher clocks, and the overclock achieved here could also indicate that there is a little more performance left on the table (although, perhaps we shouldn't read in too much from overclocks on initial reference samples as speed / yield analysis has to take in a far greater number of factors over a wider range of samples).

Ultra or not, with the GeForce 7800 GTX its not exactly as though we are hankering for gobs more performance, in fact the reality is that we are looking more for killer applications that will take these graphics boards by the scruff of the neck and really begin to push them, but unfortunately there doesn't appear to be that much in the way of "killer apps" in the coming months. Still the 7800 GTX offers great performance on current titles allowing users higher performance on the applications that were showing some graphics limitations or further increase to IQ settings, added to that is the SLI capabilities to ensure that there is even more room to run at high resolutions, with high image quality options and still very high performances!

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