![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Thursday , March 09, 2006
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
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.
Extreme High Def Gaming
NVIDIA is pushing “Extreme High-Definition” gaming with these video cards. Their idea here is that more and more people are starting to run at higher resolutions while playing games. In order to better support very large widescreen displays, NVIDIA is including support for Dual-Dual Link TMDS transmitters in their GPUs. The GeForce 7900 GT and GTX have built within the GPU itself, internal TMDS transmitters capable of Dual Link support. This means your new GeForce 7900 GT and GTX will be capable of driving very high resolution displays like the new 30” displays capable of 2560x1600 resolution, or higher. The GeForce 7600 GT will just have ONE Dual Link DVI connector support and the other one will be standard Single Link DVI.
Talking a little bit about HDCP for a moment, there has been quite a stir lately about this technology that Hollywood is pushing. Whether you agree with it or not, it seems that if you will want to watch BluRay or HD-DVD movies, you will need to have this technology supported. There are several components that are required to make this happen, your display, your video card, your OS, and the content. NVIDIA’s GPUs support HDCP, which is to say that the GPU itself is ready. That is not to say your video card will be ready. The key component is actually a ROM that has to be installed on the video cards themselves that contain HDCP keys. The addition of these ROMs are up to the add-in-board manufacturers to include, not ATI or NVIDIA. (Well, in ATI’s case since they do make their own boards perhaps some of that burden is on them.) For NVIDIA though it is fully up to their add-in-board partners to include HDCP support on video cards. Currently there are no end-user add-in-cards you can buy in retail that give you HDCP capability to our knowledge. So to put it simply, these GPUs are ready for HDCP, but we have yet to see video cards that are.
PureVideo
Part of the Extreme Hi-Def experience is PureVideo. There are some new key features that are now supported through PureVideo. The one you are probably most concerned about is hardware accelerated H.264 support. On March 2nd NVIDIA release Beta ForceWare v84.12 which now provides H.264 accelerated support for all GeForce 6 and GeForce 7 series video cards. Among this support is also acceleration for VC-1 acceleration which is one of the CODECs for high definition DVDs. There are also some new noise reduction and spatial temporal de-interlacing and inverse telecine features to help improve video quality. As we mentioned the GPUs are HDCP ready and they also support HDMI.
GeForce 7900 GTX/GT and 7600 GT:
From left to right, GeForce 7900 GTX, GeForce 7900 GT, GeForce 7600 GT.
What we have to test with today are reference video cards provided by NVIDIA. We tried our best to secure retail video cards for this evaluation, but we came up short. Look forward to retail evaluations in the future.
The GeForce 7900 GTX looks exactly like the GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB video card. The length is the same, the width is the same and it uses the same heatsink and fan cooling system. You literally cannot tell the two apart simply by looking at the cards. The cooling solution is so massive that it doesn’t have to spin up very fast to keep it cool, making this a near-silent cooling solution. Air is drawn from inside the case and exhausted out the back of your computer. Both DVI ports are Dual Link DVI.
The GeForce 7900 GT is actually smaller than the GeForce 7800 GT, it is exactly half an inch shorter. It is also lighter with the reference heatsink and fan unit compared to the reference heatsink and fan unit on the GeForce 7800 GT. The memory modules are exposed as no passive or active cooling is required. The modules on this card are Samsung GDDR3 rated at 1.4ns or 700MHz. Since the default memory speed is at 660MHz on this video card there should be a little wiggle room for memory overclocking.
The GeForce 7600 GT is even smaller than the 7900 GT; three quarters of an inch smaller for a total length of only 7 inches. The GeForce 7600 GT is so efficient it doesn’t even require external power to operate. Just plug it into your PCI-Express slot and you are ready to go. The memory modules are also exposed on this card and it is also running the same Samsung GDDR3 at 1.4ns, which is already at the memories limit at 700MHz. Keep in mind that only one of the DVI ports is Dual Link, the other is Single Link.