Veni vidi vici:

I came, I saw, I conquered. That's the phrase NVIDIA had in mind for the past few weeks and exactly what they managed to do.

Entertaining stuff. You know, I've never tested graphics cards as fast as the past week. Our recorded gaming time demo's were simply flying and it didn't take long before the 7800 GTX 512MB finished them. Yes, this card of course is a friggin' beast! It's the supreme one among the fastest, cream of the crop, it's faster and more furious and yes, it'll even stun you more than Uma Thurman "Sugar-mommy" in Kill Bill. This is the Jenna Jameson of graphics cards.

Well, what did you expect? Obviously this is the fastest product on the market available today, and when I say today I mean it as your local distributors have had this "dog of gaming" on stock for two weeks already. It's a brave thing that NVIDIA is doing. In Latin I'd say qui audet adipiscitur, and NVIDIA dares and thus wins this years round in high-end gaming. What you do need to be aware of is that this little gem requires a really fast CPU. A high-end graphics card needs a symbiosis with a high-end PC. A 3.4 GHz Pentium 4 or a rather sizable AMD64 Athlon 3400+ is something you need at the very least. Even with our Athlon 4000+ testing rig we ran into CPU limitation here and there. This is also the reason why we included the AMD 64 FX-57 results, to show you the importance of CPU limitation and the effect it can have on performance. Remember what I told you regarding prices versus performance level though okay ?

I have to get one thing out of the way first though as it has been bugging me since the day I heard it - pricing. It's absolutely crazy to see how much you have to pay for the true high-end cards these days. Really, prices are so high that it's derisory. Who of you honestly can afford this card ? Or an even better question, who of you is even willing to pay that much money to play games ? Sure, it's an investment that'll last a long time but pricing has gotten out of hand. In a year or two will we be at an 800 USD level ?

As weird as it might sound, manufacturers like NVIDIA and ATI really do not care that much about the high-end product in terms of selling them as margins are small and usually less than 2% of their total sales is actually their top high-end cards.

However it is extremely important for the chip manufacturer to have the fastest product available. You need to beat the competition, and face it, the fastest product will influence the rest of the line-up positively. Also, it's about reputation. 650 USD... gosh! But whether I agree with it or not doesn't really matter, the product will sell anyway.

The price is the only thing I really can complain about. This card is a gamers wet dream and everybody would like to have one in their rig. If you say you don't then you are flat out lying. Excruciatingly high framerates fly over your screen, you have a feature set that is breathtaking and a card that is actually silent while managing all that pixel madness.

Let's talk numbers, FPS that is. Half-Life 2 at 16x12 with 4xAA and 8x AF ... it's doing 102 FPS on average ! Chronicles of Riddick with 16xAF, 107 FPS ! Not a game, but 3DMark05 poops out a score of 9577 at default and when you enabled 4xAA and 8xAF you'll still get a score of 8577. Quake 4 at 1600x1200 with 4xAA and 16xAF .. 83 FPS. This list goes on and on, it's just incredible performance. The gameplay feels perfect and in balance. It's just all right for some reason.

Of course if you want to decode high-quality playback DVD, MPEG-2 etc over the graphics core and offload the CPU of yours you still need to chip in an additional 20 to 50 USD (yes you get options too) for the PureVideo decoder to be able to utilize that function. It's making me gradually more annoyed, especially when you just spend 650 bucks on a graphics card. Either way, if you decide to hook up the graphics card to a HDTV screen it definitely is recommended though as you'll receive an excellent decoding package with the industries finest de-interlacing options available.

Cooling then, and the new 7800 GTX with 512MB of beatae memoriae (blessed memory) updates the current 7800 GTX to a bulky appearance with that big two slot cooler. Whether you like dual-slot coolers or not, this one works very well and is actually cool to look at. It keeps the graphics card temperature wise well within safety limits yet it's dead-silent. The heat-pipe technology works really well. Fantastic stuff and rather impressive.

Doing the SLI thang - For the 5 people here in the Netherlands that can afford two of these cards and activate them in SLI mode, well congratulations. A) you are rich and B) butter butter butter smooth gameplay is what you can expect. You can activate the highest resolutions, then enable 8 levels of AA and then set 16 levels of AF. The cards just don't care and will do it with at the least a 60 FPS framerate. Take Chaos Theory for example, with HDR enabled 16 levels of AF at 1600x1200 it did roughly 100 frames per second. What about Quake 4 then ? A 1600x1200 resolution with 8xAA and 16xAF .. yes, 78 FPS ! Craaazeey ! It's the fellowship of cards, Mordor in your box ! Remember the PSU requirements though and the fact that you need a very spicy processor to feed these minions.

Once I finished testing the 7800 GTX 512MB I moved it over to my primary system and started playing some games to see how it was behaving on a HDTV environment. I recently got myself a 24" LCD with a gorgeous 1920x1200 resolution. Suffice to say that whatever game I played it was playing at wonderful framerates. Some titles I have been playing lately are F.e.a.r, Quake 4 and the one that is really eating my time away is Age of Empires III. That last title at 1920x1200 is a truly extraordinary experience with massive shaders and complex scenery. The force is strong on that one. The first time you play it with the 7800 GTX 512 MB .. ehm, how do I describe this? Well your mouth will remain open for the first two minutes. You'll start with a "wo" sound and just before your mouth closes it'll end with "oow".

Yes, NVIDIA has decided to remain the king of 3D graphics, and the ATI posse won't like that for sure but it's the way it is.

Of course I have to include some closing comments on the GeForce 7800 GTX 512 MB from Point of View. I really don't need to say much about performance of course. The package as we received it is the Extreme version, the slightly higher clocked core and memory results in a little higher then reference performance. ANY reference based card can easily be overclocked to the same level though. The fruits of labor for that package is the bundle. For just 16 bucks extra over the suggested retail price there are six games included. You also receive the HDTV block (small hint to the industry here, HDMI connector please!) and pretty much everything else you'll need. A highly recommended package that'll cost 666 USD/EUR. If you are on the market for this card then definitely write it down on your list. We are awarding POV for this entire bundle.

You know (and this really is my closing comment) I really would like to be angry at NVIDIA for releasing a product in this pricing level, but the 7800 GTX 512MB is just too darn good. It's not worth to pay 650 bucks to be able to play games, but the thing is, once you've bought this young scoundrel, you really won't regret it!

Our thanks go out to Adam "Victurus te saluto" Foat for their support to Guru3D.com and my endless number of requests e.g. "was it shipped yet ?" Next to that I must mention Mr. JZ from Point of View who had to pull some serious magic to supply us with a card.

** Small update, we used supplied ForceWare 81.89 drivers in this test and not 81.85 as we noted at the info page.
** November 15th - On Page 26 we added results of Chronicles of Riddick specifially with Shader Mode: 2.0 ++ (SoftShadows) enabled
** December 1st - Added HD peformance results

Let me end this article with one last Latin phrase: sona si latine loqueris (yeah, Google it).

Products: NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX 512 MB (also SLI)
Point of View Information - pointofview-online.com
NVIDIA - nvidia.com
Price: MSRP 649 USD/EUR

Are these blisters on the top of my fingers ? (Ed: Oww, my eyes!)