Date:
Thursday , March 09, 2006
Category:
GPU / Video Cards
Manufacturers:
NVIDIA
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett

NVIDIA GeForce 7900 Series Preview

NVIDIA’s new GeForce 7 series GPUs are poised to provide you with an Extreme High-Definition gaming experience. We’ll talk about what is new, what isn’t, and show you what it all boils down to in terms of the real gameplay experience provided.

Introduction

Spring already? NVIDIA has its “spring refresh,” and they cleaned a few things up, repackaged what they already have, and have given us that new silicon kind of feeling. We love the smell of silicon in the morning.

It has now been eight months since NVIDIA announced and hard launched their next generation GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) technology codenamed G70, better known as the GeForce 7800 series. The GeForce 7800 GTX and GT have been very successful GPUs for NVIDIA. Many gamers around the world have purchased video cards based on these GPUs to simply have better gaming experiences. While these GPUs were successful, around four months ago NVIDIA decided to up the ante even more by introducing a mini-refresh of their high-end GPU, the 7800 GTX offering even more performance with more local framebuffer memory and higher clock speeds. While this card was “hard launched” its inventory quickly dropped into obscurity bringing with it stories that it was only launched by NVIDIA to help win the benchmarks that it puts so much value in. NVIDIA insists that sales simply outstripped supply. Either way, there have not been many of these cards around, and after so long, it has really left us feeling that it was not much more than a type of red herring.

The big news for NVIDIA today is that their high-end GPU has gone 90 nanometers. This actually isn’t their first 90 nanometer GPU, the GeForce 7300 GS is built on the 90 nanometer process. NVIDIA has stated they have very good yields and no problems producing this GPU at 90 nanometers. The new GPUs today though are the first high-end and midrange GPUs from NVIDIA using the new manufacturing process.

What does this new process allow? It allows NVIDIA to produce more silicon per wafer, reducing cost and allowing better yields. It also allows something else, something very exciting and something you probably never thought would be possible, a reduction in transistors. Yes, with the new line of GPUs being announced today NVIDIA has actually reduced the amount of transistors in their GPUs compared to the original G70 series. As you all know a reduction in transistors means less power, which means less heat, which means higher clock speeds are possible with more manageable cooling solutions. So can NVIDIA do more with less? We will certainly show you.

Before we get into what is different let us first talk about what is the same, because there is a lot more of the same, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.