[Fozzik]

Strangely it's almost yawn-inducing at this point, but Nvidia has done a hard launch again, and the high-end graphics market just got a little more interesting. The truth of it is that these are damn good parts Nvidia is putting out. What seems to be taking the luster off of things a little bit is the huge gaping hole where the competition should be. Nvidia is squarely on the top of the market all alone…and I'm sure there are others like me who are getting a little sick of waiting for ATI's answer… especially since ATI "announced" their R520 more than a few months ago.

Basically, the 7800GT is a slightly lower-performing, and therefore lower priced, version of the G70 (7800GTX). It's already in stores online for around $400, and it seems almost every company is overclocking it from its default core and memory speeds to bring it even closer in performance to the GTX.


As it is, this new card provides more bang for the high-end graphics buck, and shakes things up a bit. It basically replaces the 6800 Ultra, as it is similarly priced and much faster.
Here are the differences between the GTX and GT -

The GTX has 24 pixel engines (pipelines), 8 vertex engines, a core clock of 430 MHz, and a memory clock of 600MHz (it's GDDR3, so 1200MHz effective).

The new GT has 20 pixel engines, 7 vertex engines, a core clock of 400 MHz and a memory clock of 500MHz (also GDDR3, so 1000 MHz effective).

As you might expect, it looks like performance is fairly close between the two parts.

There are several great things about this launch. For one, it replaces the 6800 Ultra with a higher performing part for a similar price. For another, it will be pushing the prices down on the entire 6xxx series from Nvidia. For a third, almost all graphics card manufacturers are now overclocking the chips and memory from Nvidia defaults... so you are getting quite a bit of value for your money. A quick glance over at newegg and I saw core clock speeds out of the box of around 450 MHz, and memory speeds of 550 MHz or so. Good stuff.

We continue to wait for any kind of answer from ATI...Nvidia is very calmly and effectively executing it's business plan, and ATI has now not only respun it's R520 multiple times, but also sent it's crossfire motherboard chipsets back for another spin... further delaying the promising motherboards based on their new products. Come on ATI...give us a fight we can get excited about!