NVIDIA GeForce 7900GS Benchmarked 118
Spinnerbait writes "NVIDIA has launched another salvo of more competitively priced graphics cards, this time hitting the sub-$200 mark. The
new GeForce 7900GS is built on a 90nm fab process with 20
pixel shaders and 7 vertex shaders. The end result is that just about any
medium to high res gaming situation can be handled with high levels of
anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, while maintaining more than acceptable
frame rates. Best of all, you can actually purchase a card in retail
today, so this is no paper launch."
no AGP :( (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a dedicated ATI user, but I'd buy the best price/performance card for if someone was still supporting AGP.
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Yes it does support DDR2 (Score:1)
It's a terrific board at an incredible price. The only reason I didn't buy one is that it's reportedly tough to install current Linux versions on it.
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I've had one for almost a year now and it runs great. OC'd an A64 in it without issue - plays games at framerates comparable to similar boards, no stability issues, and I've got an upgrade path to a new video card
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Ah, the 7800GS for $270-$300. Which I believe is still a good bit faster then my old 6800 and will perform well enough to be worth the upgrade price (before I ditch the 2GHz Opteron unit for a dual-core or quad-core CPU down the road).
That reminds me, I need to go look for benchmarks...
OT video cards (Score:2)
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http://www.matrox.com/mga/workstation/video/home.
For example they have 10/12bit per channel output cards having plugins for Premiere.
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You get paid in leet hardware?
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My raction?
I bought a brand-spanking-new AM2 motherboard/CPU, PCI-E video card, and new sticks of DDR2.
Oh, and a new hard drive.
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Which one? (Score:5, Funny)
Operating Systems
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Re:Which one? (Score:4, Insightful)
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I have a decent spec'd system too. geforce 7900gt, x2 4400, 2gig ram, bad ass powersupply, and I stil drop into the low 20's
OT: Remember that "Dawn" demo? (Score:2)
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question (Score:1)
a funny way of saying arbitrary discretized kernel?
Re:question (Score:5, Informative)
It is a very pleasing effect, however it does require some power to do and thus can slow down higher end games.
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connotative. thanks for your insight.
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This card was on woot.com not too long ago... (Score:2)
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I don't even like nVidia GPUs. I figured I could find someone to buy them for the retail price.
Still, I did try one out. In City of Heroes, the only game I care about, it performed roughly on par with my ATI X1900XT (within 1 - 2 fps), a card that costs about 2.5 times what the 7900GS does.
Granted, CoH isn't exactly an ATI-friendly game.
But whoever ends up with those cards will probably be pretty happy.
Nice, but no thanks. (Score:3, Funny)
Seems like a good casual gamer card. Of course the NIC integrated with my MotherBoard (bought/built in January) has been good enough for my PC gaming so far.
Sub $200 is nice
Re:Nice, but no thanks. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Nice, but no thanks. (Score:4, Funny)
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Mac Support (Score:2)
It looks like this is another one in Nvidia's line that includes support for Macs as well as Windows machines on the same card. At least OS X is listed in the supported OS's. Hopefully they will continue to bundle firmware for both PCs and Macs on the same card, instead of trying to gouge Mac users. Way to go Nvidia.
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Re:Mac Support (Score:5, Informative)
I am confused by this. Is it Nvidia's decision for OSX to support a new card, or Apple's? In the past, Apple's high quality control has in part been a result of targeting only selected hardware.
Umm, actually in the past video cards did not support Macs for two main reasons. First, they often used ADC, which pulled power for the monitor as well as the video feed and which required extra work to support the power requirements. This has not been the case in the last several revisions of all macs. Second, the macs use EFI or OpenFirmware instead of BIOS, meaning the video card needed to support all three types of firmware. Older Nvidia cards did not support OpenFirmware which Apple used on PPC macs. Now that Apple is using EFI, Nvidia has released a couple of cards that use the DVI connector now standard on macs and which has firmware for both BIOS and EFI in the same ROM. It marketed them as video card blah for Mac and PC. Presumably, this card is continuing that beneficial trend.
The more Mac hardware resembles PC hardware, the more manufacturers will be offering Mac-compatible products. Are they automatically welcome to do so, or can Apple say, "sorry, if you put that in your case it's no longer a Mac"?
Apple is pretty open about letting anyone plug anything they want into macs and as far as I know have never locked out anything in OS X, except motherboards. As far as I know, Apple has never refused to bundle the drivers for any devices pre-installed in OS X, but should they not want to do so, the user would simply have to install them from an included CD or download.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that Apple was holding back video card manufacturers, but as far as I know, that has never been the case. ATI and Nvidia have both had Mac offerings for a long time, often with nothing more than a different ROM and clock speed, and at half again the price of the PC version.
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I thought it was a matter of endianness, and not an issue with the bios/firmware. PPCs are big endian while x86 chips are little endian. Now that Macs are running on little endian chips, nothing special needs to be done with the card other than writing a driver for the OS.
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thought it was a matter of endianness, and not an issue with the bios/firmware. PPCs are big endian while x86 chips are little endian. Now that Macs are running on little endian chips, nothing special needs to be done with the card other than writing a driver for the OS.
I think the driver is the only thing that cares about that in the first place. I know there were firmware flashes that you could use to make a PC card work in a PPC Mac, and my understanding is they just changed the ROM to deal with the
glxgears? (Score:1)
Reliability? (Score:5, Interesting)
There has been tons of speculation on what the cause might be (excessive heat, bad batch of RAMs, signal integrity problems, bad/weak power supplies, too-close-to-the-edge memory timings), but no concrete explanations from anyone.
I personally bumped into this. I built a brand new rig for myself about four months ago, and gave it an NVidia 7900GT made by eVGA. It wasn't long before stuttering graphics and exploding triangles showed up. Happily, eVGA were very committed to their product, and cross-shipped a replacement which, so far, has worked almost entirely without incident. It's my understanding that customers of competing board vendors have not been so lucky.
So whenever I see a review of the latest NVidia product, I'm afraid my first question is no longer, "How fast is it?" but, "How reliable is it?" I think burn-in tests should become a standard part of a reviewer's benchmark suite.
Schwab
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My own card behaves itself 99.999% of the time. But every so often I notice a wayward triangle (which disappears quickly). My machine is stock; nothing is overclocked beyond how it arrived from the factory. This suggests to me that the card is still flirting with a hairy edge s
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Needless to say, if you read the eVGA forums (or other forums for PC builders) this was a huge problem for people running at stock speeds.
More Reviews (Score:5, Informative)
HardOCP [hardocp.com]
Guru3D [guru3d.com]
Anandtech [anandtech.com]
Bjorn3D [bjorn3d.com]
PCPerspective [pcper.com]
nV News [nvnews.net]
Review lacks scope (Score:5, Insightful)
If any reviewer is reading this please please put more context in the form of older models into your reviews. Comparing them against the current mid/high range cards does nothing for someone who doesnt obsessively follow video card benchmarks.
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I have no idea how all the newer cards relate to one another.
Was the 6800 Gt better than the 6800 GS and has now been replaced by a 7xxx YY ? Just trying to look up yours i saw: 6800 GS Extreme, 6800 Extreme, 6800 XT and something else, but no more 6800 GT, How many of those are the same? Which is better? Heck i cant get the sequence of one manufacturer figured out much less compare to the other
Now i just wait until i KNOW mine is too old (that would be NOW!) and find one at about $150-200 (prices
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Name_of_Card____Vertex_Pipelines___Textures/Cloc k____Core_Speed___Memory_Bandwidth
GeForce_7900GS_____
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Re:Review lacks scope (Score:4, Informative)
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beats a PS3 (Score:1)
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seriously. I am an avid computer guy, but i dont like gaming on computers. it is much simpler to buy a console (my preference was the gamecube because it was inexpensive, worked well and games were readily avail (on the cheap via ebay))
I like gaming on a tv, no driver issues, no problems, just put the disc in and go. No worrying about framerates and other irrelevant bullshit just to play a video game for a few hours a week.
that 200 dollar card will work for now, until
drivers for OSS (Score:1)
I've just spent too much time trying to configure a Matrox G550 and a Nvidia Quadro 280 to deal nicely with dual-head. Both are busted with recent releases (6.8, 6.9) of Xorg.
pixel/vertex shaders (Score:1)
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Shaders are small (the first versions had an 8 instruction limit, now they can be much more complex, but they are still in the order of hundreds of bytes), domain-specific programs that the gpu executes on each pixel and vertex. They are coded to achieve different effects like normal mapping or blurs. The name comes from the fact that the
This card was on Woot! for $150 a while ago (Score:2)
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Going to test it in a mac pro at work sometime next week, see if it boots.
H.264 (Score:2)
Old nerds die hard... (Score:1)
Sheesh I must be getting old! I understood sentences 1 and 4 in that!
Question : will it do gvim OK?
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This how these things work though. If they wanted to price it at $150, they would set the actual price at $149 and say that it's priced at "sub-$150."
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Re:$200, not sub-$200 (Score:4, Informative)
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10% (or even 5%) works fine.
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