Point of View GeForce 7800 GTX

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G70 is NVIDIA's internal codename for the GeForce 7800 GTX. At this very moment, this is the only graphics card released in the 7x00 range. I'm not doubting there will be many new products later on. But this 7800 GTX is the new flagship, the fastest available. And I know that many of you are wondering if will there be an AGP version. To be honest, at this time and moment NVIDIA has no plans for it. That doesn't mean it'll never happen though as they can use the well known bridge chip (High Speed Interconnect) and make it AGP compatible. Face it, AGP is becoming history.

$ffffffffff ---------------------------------------------------
$ffffffffff Display adapter information
$ffffffffff ---------------------------------------------------
$0000000000 Description : NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX
$0000000001 Vendor ID : 10de (NVIDIA)
$0000000002 Device ID : 0091
$0000000003 Location : bus 5, device 0, function 0
$0000000004 Bus type : PCIE
$000000000f PCIE link width : 16x supported, 16x selected
$ffffffffff ---------------------------------------------------
$ffffffffff NVIDIA specific display adapter information
$ffffffffff ---------------------------------------------------
$0100000000 Graphics core : G70 revision A1 (24x1,8vp)
$0100000001 Hardwired ID : 0090 (ROM strapped to 0091)
$0100000002 Memory bus : 256-bit
$0100000003 Memory type : DDR (RAM configuration 07)
$0100000004 Memory amount : 262144KB
$0100000005 Core clock : 303.750MHz
$0100000006 Memory clock : 630.000MHz (1260.000MHz effective)

Let's dig a little deeper into the chip. As you know the number of transistors in the actual silicon gives us a nice idea about performance.  Intel's new Pentium 4 6xx series for example have 169 million transistors. The GeForce 6800 already had 222 million transistors. And now the GeForce 7800 GTX has 302 million transistors, crazy huh? It's being manufactured on a 0.11 micron fabrication process.

Specs GeForce 6600 GeForce 6600 GT GeForce 6800 GeForce 6800 GT GeForce 6800 Ultra GeForce 7800 GTX
Codename NV43 NV43 NV40 NV40GT NV40U G70
Transistors ? ? 222 million 302 million
Process, GPU maker 110nm 110nm 130nm, IBM 110nm
Core clock 300 MHz 500 MHz Up to 400 MHz 350MHz 400MHz 430 MHz
Memory 128MB DDR1 128MB GDDR3 128MB DDR1 256MB GDDR3
Memory bus 128-bit 256-bit
Memory clock Up to manufacturer 2x500 MHz 2 x 550MHz 2 x 500MHz 2 x 600MHz
PCB P212 P212 P2?? P210 P210 -
Pipelines 8 8 12 16 16 24
FP operations FP16, FP32
DirectX DirectX 9.0c
Pixel shaders PS 3.0
Vertex shaders VS 3.0
OpenGL 1.5+ (2.0) 2.0
Price $150 $229 $299 $399 $499 $599
Availability Now
 

So what are the major advantages over the Series 6 6800 Ultra? Well, feature wise we are looking pretty much at the same technology. There are a few differences though, which we'll get into later. Overall the 7800 GTX is mostly about increased efficiency and higher performance over the previous generation product.

What is a shader ?
What do we need to render a three dimensional object; 2D on your monitor? We start off by building some sort of structure that has a surface, that surface is being built from triangles and why triangles? They are quick to calculate. How's each triangle being processed? Each triangle has to be transformed according to its relative position and orientation to the viewer. Each of the three vertices the triangle is made up of is transformed to its proper view space position. The next step is to light the triangle by taking the transformed vertices and applying a lighting calculation for every light defined in the scene. At last the triangle needs to be projected to the screen in order to rasterize it. During rasterization the triangle will be shaded and textured.

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