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The Verdict
Well, this verdict is going to be complex as there are some many choices and products we discussed today. First my sincere congratulations to NVIDIA for introducing a new product line but more importantly new products in the lower priced high-end segment. And then there's that even better product in the mid-range section.
All products as tested today are stunning from a certain point of view. They all offer great to fantastic performance for the money, they are all SLI capable and for once fall within a pricing level that we all can life with. These new Series 7 products have Dual-Link DVI connectors which is just brilliant as HD gaming is coming people. 24" LCD monitor's that can handle 1920x1200 for example already dropped to a 800 USD pricing level and although that's a heft amount of money it's getting (very slowly) mainstream. Yours truly works with two such monitors in dual-view mode and I can tell you that high-resolution gaming is the new trend.
Playing games in that mode is just breathtaking. Next to that the PC's are getting more and more into the living room. Playing games on your HD screen always has been an issue. With the 7600, 7800, 7900 cards your problems are gone. Not only can play very well in HD resolutions, in combination with PureVideo you can have rather orgasmic playback features over that graphics card of yours as well. In my living room for example I have a 7800 GT setup HTPC which decodes High-Definition .TS files, the results of the geForce series 7 combo and purevideo are that the graphics card will decode that heft stream over the GPU while the CPU pretty much sits on it's ass. All that with extremely high quality playback and de-interlacing features make all of today's product a fantastic option to buy.
But of course we need to talk games versus performance as that really what's today article is all about. Let's chat about me feelings to each and everyone of the cards one by one.
GeForce 7600 GT
This is the card that most of you are going to buy. Why? It's affordable and offers serious bang for your hard earned bucks. If I had to sum this product up in two words it would be: absolutely fantastic. The 7600 GT was designed to fight the Radeon X1600 XT and whether ATI likes it or not, the 7600 GT will simply wipe the floor with that X1600 XT. But ATI does have something else in the works though, the Radeon X1800 GTO (our review was just finished). Next to that due to this product launch ATI lowered prices massivley over the entire X1000 range. The X1600 Pro will cost $109, the X1600 XT will cost $149. That X1800 GTO product arrived in our lab yesterday so I was not able to insert it's results into this article on-time anymore.
ATI's image quality might be a small notch better to be honest. We still have an unusually large amount of users in our forums reporting "shimmering" issues in certain games. When they disable the optimizations image quality goes back to good yet they loose 5 maybe 10% performance. This is definitily the stuff NVIDIA should focus on.
I have to demystify a myth also. Team red claims that Series 7 can't handle both HDR and antialiasing at the same time. That's only partly true, NVIDIA's Series 7 product can do so for sure yet they use another method. Here's the issue, G7x hardware does not support multisample antialiasing with fp16 render targets. The G7x series however can support AA with HDR through a variety of other methods, including supersampling and application specific implementation. Now in more simple terms, NVIDIA does support multisampling with HDR when HDR is handled by shaders (and not by floating point 16 buffer). Some games examples that already do this are Far Cry, HL2 and my favorite game, Age of Empires. I tend to believe that ATI's performance will be better though. I have decided to do an article on this matter in the upcoming weeks.
But let's leave that for what it is, the mid-range GeForce 7600 GT is fighting against a class of cards that it should not be fighting as the card is often darn close to the Radeon X1800 XL and NVIDIA's own GeForce 7800 GT unless you start using AA and AF modes after which it'll drop back to GeForce 6800 GS and 6800 GT performance. But then again, Quake 4 at 34 frames per second at 1920x1200 with 4xAA and 8xAF... for less than 200 bucks yeah, this is a b-e-autiful product for sure.
In SLI mode that number would rise towards a stunning 66 FPS .. so yeah that's double performance. SLI works fantastic and straight out of the box. You install a driver, select SLI mode and bang easy to do, work with and setup.
It's a Series 7 product thus is supports all the features I mention before but let's not forget stuff like HDR, Shader Model 3 and all the features that the Series 7 products entail. That includes SLI functionality, we tested it for you and yeah it works nicely. The GeForce 7600 GT offers an exceptional amount of bang for your bucks and when your performance starts to suck, simply add another card into your SLI system and double up that performance. You just have to like this product. Also it's single slot solution is nice, not too loud either. Yeah, great stuff.
Well I should wrap this up, otherwise the verdict will be a mile long. Onto the next product verdict shall we.
GeForce 7900 GT
Sweet momma daddy likes some sugar in his coffee and this card is the sugar!
This is a lower segment priced high-end graphics card that is performing extremely well for it's money. Get this: a suggested retail price of 299 USD folks. That's just fantastic as this thing smokes the GeForce 7800 GT and even is as fast or even faster than a GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB. Of course the 7900 GT is lined up against the similar priced Radeon X1800 XL & Radeon X1800 XT. Suffice to say that at 299 USD this is a very sweet product. ATI has counteracted though by lowering prices. The X1800 XT is now fighting with this GT as it's placed at a $329 price, interesting for sure. And hey great for us, the consumers. The GeForce 7900 GT 256MB however is easily one of the best products we have seen from NVIDIA ever considering it's at this price range.
When we play Splinter Cell 3 with HDR enabled and 16 levels of anisotropic filtering we can still play at 1920x1200 with an average framerate of close to 40 FPS and that game really kills off any card.
So this really is a very strong performer for an absolutely magnificent price. Again we see fun stuff when we enable SLI mode, it's not 100% doubled performance but it most certainly helps. As an example, Quake 4 at 1920x1200 with 4xAA and 8xAF with a single card showed 65 FPS and in SLI mode it's managing to poop out 101 FPS.
But let us not forget that entire Series 7 feature set can be found back in this product and of course, I really like it a lot. Right now this probably is the most recommended product from me personally and since we are on the topic of personal likes, this card for me is the winner of the day. So when you can spare 299 bucks, then this is a very obvious choice that comes highly recommended by myself personally. (Ed: and I, being a technology whore, went out and bought 2 today for a new SLI gaming rig, so yes they are available and at the 299 USD pricepoint).
GeForce 7900 GTX
And then there's the new flagship product. I really do hope that this one will be available in mass volume though as the GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB was a friggin disaster to find. That drove prices sky high and it really was just silly to see the card pop-up in our pricewatch databases for 1000 USD, rediculous. You just have to grant ATI the respect that they have earned, the 1900 series was available from day one with the suggested prices. That being said, prices again came down 499 USD for a flagship 7900 GTX 512MB series products and yes indeed, ATI will follow as they just lowered prices for the 1900 XT to $479 and $549 for the XTX.
Despite the fact that I expected a GPU with more pixel pipelines NVIDIA did some very clever stuff. The chip design somehow got more efficient. Due to the new fabrication process we see a much higher clock frequency and faster memory. And yet the silicon itself has less transistors compared to the previous G70 (7800 GTX). Less transistors means saving money to produce that silicon and that's exactly what I enjoy so much about this product, it saves you a bundle of money.
It's again the fastest flagship graphics card available (marginally here and there with the X1900 XTX from ATI) yet it's price... yeah that's what I like the most. You want to know why? For the past two years I have been complaining that high-end graphics card were getting more and more expensive and that only the rich are able to buy these cards. The (and I stated this in my articles) graphics industry would be killing off its own business as people don't have the money left to buy the actual games. Where's the fun if you need to chip in 650 USD to be able to play games? Now performance wise this product is lined up against the Radeon X1900 XTX and at the moment of writing this article (Monday the 6th of March) I started receiving emails from ATI. As stated they are and have been counter-reacting and the X1900 XTX for example just dropped around thar 500 USD pricetag also. That's how fierce this business is, both are extremely excellent and impressive products.
So the GeForcer 7900 GTX 512MB surely is a little faster than the 7800 GTX 512MB, yet it's priced 150 USD cheaper, now how can you lose on that? Two very large thumbs up here for whoever made that call as finally the industry has been listening to what we the press and consumers have been shouting for quite a while now. Very respectful and this will set a new trend in the graphics arena for sure.
Gaming performance... this little focker is fast, really really fast. And since it's fast it offers an incredible amount of flexibility. If you like to play your games at 1920x1200 like I do then you do not have to compromise at all. Turn on 4xAA and sixteen levels of anisotropic filtering, the card will still push well over 80 frames per second (on average) in Quake 4 for example. So I really do not need to go into much detail to describe how well games play with this little gem. 499 USD however is still a large pile of money to be able to play games but for the enthusiast user I can only say hey, this is a highly recommended card.
If you do not want to spend such an amount of money then definitely go for that mighty fine 7900 GT. And yes .. are you limited to 199 USD ? Of course that GeForce 7800 GT offers some serious punch for not a lot of money. In retrospect from A to Z all three products are highly recommended and for once I really can't find anything negative (and that really doesn't happen often).
The final last words ... All products tested today ladies and gents did not crash once. So we have three completely new graphics cards in both Single and Dual in SLI setup, all products actively stressed in all our tests and seriously not once did we have a problem whatsoever, we litterally ran multiple hindreds of tests so in my book that's just now that's golden stuff.
I really need to shut up as I tend to ramble on in the conclusion and you are probably more tired from reading this article then I am from writing it :) But I want to end with this, in our forums we see a lot of people constantly fight with each other over brand RED is better than brand GREEN and vice versa. People come on, the products that you see released today at this pricing level is a direct result of the fierce competition between ATI and NVIDIA. I've been writing about graphics cards ever since 1997 and when I thought about it; not once went a flagship product down in price. So be happy of all the fine goodness that manufacturers like ATI and NVIDIA bring to us these days as that competition has made the graphics industry evolve in such a great manner over the past few years that it's surprising.
I for one just love to be part of exactly this industry as time after time we constantly are amazed by it's progress.
We have the ability to play games at high image quality and extremely high resolutions over the entire new product line and yet it remains to be an affordable product line. I welcome it that the prices in the high-end segment went down and I like the goods that NVIDIA is delivering to us for sure. Two large thumbs up for NVIDIA for doing so, as this is the way it's meant to be played.
The final last words(2) Of course thanks have to go out towards NVIDIA for making this article possible. This my friends is just the preview, in the upcoming weeks you can be sure that many manufacturers will submit their new Series 7 products to Guru3D.com to be reviewed, which will prolly keep us busy until the summer. Believe it or not the first article is already up. You can click here to read a full blown in-depth review on eVGA's GeForce 7900 GTX 512MB spanking new "superclocked" graphics card.
Right I gotta leave to Hannover in a couple of hours, yes expect a CeBIT article/pictorial over the weekend or early next week.
On a personal note I have to say Cheers to Adam for supplying us with six new cards 48 hours prior to the launch ;)
