Nvidia GeForce 7800 GTX

Well Rob beat me to a blog about the recently announced (have you guys noticed there was very little Nvidia hype about this product, especially compared to the GeForce 6800?) next generation Nvidia GPU, called the GeForce 7800 GTX. Not only did he write about it, he ended up purchasing one! I have to say congratulations brother, this looks like one heck of a graphics card. With it's fourth-generation CineFX engine to it's 64-bit texture implementation this card has all the latest bells and whistles. The benchmarks available at third party websites show that it excels not only on today's games but should perform extremely well on upcoming ones. Rob told me about the available high definition video's on Nvidia's website which showcase the graphical capabilities of this new GPU in a most impressive manner (Attn Mac users: unfortunately you need a fairly powerful Windows XP based system to view them).

I like the fact that this card was redesigned from the ground up to be more efficient rather than just increasing the clock and memory speed to get additional performance. This allowed them to create a single slot solution that runs cooler and quieter than the previous generation and it won't require a separate power supply as many rumor sites predicted.

Actually what impressed me most was the fact that Nvidia did away with the horrible practice of paper launching and announced immediate availability of this new card. CoolTechZone did an excellent article regarding this and deserves a good read. Hopefully ATI will follow Nvidia's lead and eliminate paper launches as well.

Another interesting fact is that the 7800 GTX was created as a pure PCI Express part and they quietly announced that they have no intention of making an AGP version unless the consumer demand requires it. Now normally I wouldn't mind this, especially since my PC has a PCIe graphics slot but I was hoping that a PowerMac version of this card would be created. As I'm sure you all know, all Apple PowerMac's use an AGP 8X slot for their graphic cards. With Apple increasing using the power of the GPU for its software (CoreImage, QuartzExtreme, Motion, ect..) I was looking forward to upgrading my PowerMac with the latest generation GPU. A recent MacWorld article touches upon the same questions.