Conclusion

In the conclusion to our original "G70: NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX Review" we included the following:

"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..."

Some five months after the initial G70 release we now do have a 7800 card with higher core and memory clocks and a double height cooler, and does appear to be an "Ultra" by any other name (even the chip marking indicate it to be an "Ultra"). That said though, the levels two which the core and memory have been increased are very high, probably passing many peoples expectations, and it appears to be a fairly impressive feat for this 110nm part.

The performance increases shown by the new board, where memory quantity isn't a factor, scale much inline with the core clock rate increase, coming in a little below the fill / fragment rate increases. The new GTX has over a 40% bandwidth advantage over the older 256MB GTX, but it doesn't appear to be tapping into that very much in these tests, even with FSAA enabled, where you would expect it to more than anywhere else. The increase in RAM size is going to make differences on a title by title basis, where developers attempt to utilise more and more assets in their title to make it look better, as we saw with the Quake 4 tests here. Current users of last years high end products, such as the 6800 Ultra may want to be giving this some serious thought seeing as the performances are more than doubled in many cases now.

Of course the increases in performance the 7800 GTX 512MB board brings with it comes at a price. At and MSRP of $649 this exceeds even the introduction point of the GTX 256MB when it was first released, and it doesn't exactly appear to be priced for volume sales. NVIDIA state that these are capable to produce now where they weren't previously due to a tweak in the 110nm process, although it could be the case they have been siphoning off parts since the introduction of G70, which they have had the luxury to do, but we aren't seeing the rest of the 7800 line getting any boost either. Still, though, these are launching with partner availability, and as some have even already snuck out before the official launch.

The GeForce 7800 GTX doesn't bring anything new to the table, but it does give the 7800 line a pre-Christmas kicker, and an impressive one at that, given that this is still based on the same chip introduced five months ago and makes those high quality options more attainable in more cases.

  • If you wish to comment on this article please do so here

Other related articles: