Page 24 - The Verdict
The Verdict
Last week the 3DMark05 score for this card leaked onto the web and I have to admit I was a little surprised by the reaction from you guys, the readers. I think you all expected a 10,000 score didn't you? In the forums I noticed (yes big brother is actually watching your threads) that people mentioned that with their 6800 Ultra they could achieve that score also. Of course you can, you need a massive overclock and likely some weird tweaks or modified drivers for that but yeah, that's possible alright. But at default you'll be in the lower 5000 range. In a very blunt calculation 24 over 16 pipes offers a third more performance. (5000:16)x24=7500... I think the 7800 GTX is on par with what should be and can be expected. The true power however we notice once we enable multiple levels of anisotropic filtering and antialiasing, this little beast is hungry and is really powerful with the eye candy features enabled.
Please do not underestimate the computing power that this card offers as it's absolutely the fastest thing I've had in our testlab. In that respect, this 7800 GTX can also be overclocked and tweaked. In fact our overclock took us instantly to a 8500 score. Next to that, drivers continuously are developed and mostly offer performance increases with each build that passes by, this is the reputation that NVIDIA has. So I expect overall performance increases with newer build drivers.
Quite frankly, the 7800 GTX is a power house, overall it offers a third more power over the past high-end Series 6 product. Shader performance was increased in a very sizable amount due to some new GPU optimizations, increased pixel pipelines and two additional vertex units. Oh hey and allow me to applaud the single slot design cooling that actually is silent and working efficiently. No, I'm really impressed by this GeForce 7800 GTX. We've had absolutely no stability issues or incompatibility. Everything worked straight out of the box yet it offers you a shitload of performance and the possibility to play your games in extremely high quality. Next to that as we've shown you we did a little HDTV stuff, we'll be doing that a lot more in the future... HDTV playback, although a rather expensive solution it seriously was just fantastic. We also played some games on the HDTV, one word... brilliant. Games do need to get a bit more standard support for HDTV resolutions as with most games we had to modify an .ini file to add a custom resolution of 1280x720 for example. That's something else though, HDTV is the future and NVIDIA definitely picked up on that.
Ehm, let's see what more did I find. Ah, very interesting is that power consumption actually was lower then the Series 6 high end products. Your average 350 Watt PSU is capable enough with the card and an average system. Our Athlon 4000+/512MB/100GB-HD/DVD-Rom/7800GTX based system peaked at just over 260 Watt, charming.
What you do need to be aware of is that this little gem requires a really fast CPU though. A high-end graphics card needs a symbiosis with a high-end PC. 3.4 GHz Pentium 4 or a rather sizable AMD64 Athlon 3400+ is something you need at the least for real. Even with our Athlon 4000+ testing rig we ran into CPU limitation here and there. That's does not mean games run like crap though, oh of course not. They are way up there in the highest ranking scores and performance. Yet the graphics' card can go faster then it's allowed. The CPU simply isn't presenting data fast enough to the graphics card driver. Even a game like Half-Life 2 for example can run into that limitation if you turn off stuff like AA and AF and then measure in 1024x768. Of course you'll have incredible framerates and let me emphasize this again, at blazing speeds. But the graphics card _can_ compute faster if it was allowed to receive more data from the CPU in certain games.
Quite honestly that's a luxury problem though as future games will happily utilize all that cheer power. No, I absolute am in love with the 7800 GTX and for me there is only one downside, it's the price. The suggested retail price will become 599 USD and roughly 499 EUR and that my friends is half a monthly salary for the most of us. If you can afford it, hey I can recommend it, though I think it's an awful lot of money to play games. But nomatter how you look at it, NVIDIA has the performance crown, for how long ? Well, we'll just have to wait and see what ATI's R520 capability is.
Now then, back to BattleField 2 with everything set to high-quality, 8xS AA and 16 x AF... stutter free and yes... it actually makes me drool. Lovin' it!
Availability: right NOW ! Go check some e-tailers :)
Our thanks go out to Adam and Luciano over at NVIDIA for their everlasting support to Guru3D.com
Guys and girls, later.
Hilbert
PS - on the next four pages we posted some bonus screenshot of upcoming titles that will support the GeForce 7800 GTX 100%, pretty cool to look at. Enjoy.
