Page 3 - NVIDIA
Team Green - NVIDIA
NVIDIA is having a good time at the CeBIT. They obviously launched their new GeForce 7600 256MB, 7900 GT 256MB and 7900 GTX 512 MB. I'm not going in-depth on these products at all as we have very extensive preview (all products tested in SLI also) ready for you to read here at Guru3D.com These new products where EVERYWHERE.
So briefly ..
March 9, 2006 was the day that NVIDIA launched no less than three new products into the graphics card arena. I mentioned them already on the previous page. Now I will show you the difference among the models, its placement in the market and of course reveal the new prices.
Let me quickly reintroduce this new threesome to you.
- GeForce 7900 GTX 512 MB - Dual slot cooled - 499 USD
The GTX of course is the best card around battling the X1900 XTX at 499 USD. 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.
That being said, the CeBIT was full of these cards and you'll find loads and loads of photo's of them in this article. Guru3D's appointment was with Adam. NVIDIA, next to the new line-up was also demonstrating their Quad SLI gaming rigs.
REALLY impressive stuff and REALLY expensive stuff also. It does make an impression for sure. Observing games run at a 2560x1200 screen with 4xAA and 8xAF .. well let me tell you that it doesn't suck. Basically 4 7900 GPUs are at work with in set rendering in Alternate Frame rendering and the other SLi card in Split Frame rendering. Combined with 4 GPUs you could also do 32x anitaliasing .. yes that's right 32 times. On the AA side, I'm pretty confident it's mixing AA modes as well.
So what we'll TRY and do is see of NVIDIA can arrange a Quad SLi setup for us say at the end of this month and see how well this actually works, and yes with the 30" screen.
Next to the Quad SLi & the new Series 7 products NVIDIA also released SLi notebooks, and I was able to have a peek at a notebook with a GeForce 7900 equipped in it.
In the upcoming months NVIDIA however will also release their new mainboard chipset NFORCE solution, obviously with Socket AM2 from AMD in mind. The new series will be called NFORCE 500. We'll see the the part shipped say "mid 2006". No surprise there as that's exactly when AMD's Socket AM2 - a key component of the nForce 500 series is due to be launched.
There will be four nForce 500 chipsets: the 550, 570, 570 SLI and the 590 SLI. The two top-end 500s will both support dual x16 PCI Express graphics cards, but Nvidia said the chipsets will also support four-board set-ups (we have photo's from on the Gigabyte page of that). The 500 series will incorporate support for ten USB 2.0 devices and six 3Gbps Serial ATA drives. The chipsets' MediaShield component has been upgraded to support dual RAID 5.
Last but not least, NVIDIA is working extremely hard on PureVideo. Although in all honesty I have to admit that ATI's AVIVO is working a notch better in image quality at the moment it seemed obvious that NVIDIA is working hard behind the scenes to regain the lead they had for a long time.
What's PureVideo ? Offload the CPU by allowing the GPU to take over a huge sum of the workload in multi-media matters. HDTV decoding through, for example a TS (Transport Stream) file, can be extremely demanding for a CPU. These puppies can go to 20 Mbit/sec easily as HDTV streams offer high-resolution playback in 1280x720p or even 1920x1080p with the new 7800 & 7900 cards. In combo with the new drivers you can now decode High Definition H.264 streams. H.264 is a compression algorithm used to transmit video efficiently between endpoints. This algorithm is seen as the replacement for its predecessor, H.263. What is different about H.264 is that it promises to deliver high quality video, H.264 also enables very high quality encoding, producing better results than even MPEG2 and of course HDTV levels.
These new 7600, 7800 & 7900 cards can also manage 3:2 and 2:2 pull down (inverse telecine) of SD and HD interlaced content. Software like WinDVD, PowerDVD and Nero showtime will start to support PureVideo from within their software. You can also buy the PureVideo codec at NVIDIA after which MediaPlayer or Media Center will work with is flawlessly.
We'll follow PureVideo development closely and in the near future will take a look at both SD and HD (including) H.264 decoding.
Right .. more Photo's !
One of the cardss from the Quad SLi configuration. The focker is long for sure and consists out of the PCB layers.
The SLi connectors.
Okay one more then :)
