| | Articles | | Gainward Geforce 7800GTX Review | Gainward Geforce 7800GTX Review
Introduction
THOMSON C.S. Lee founded Gainward in 1984 with a commitment to
developing the most advanced graphics accelerators in the industry
while insuring the highest possible level of customer satisfaction. In
eighteen years, Gainward has risen to become one of the top producers
of graphics boards in Taiwan. Since 2001/2002 Gainward is the most
frequently awarded supplier of high performing 3D processor cards.
Gainward has always been a company that likes pushing things to the
limit and this Geforce 7800GTX Ultra/3500PCX Golden Sample is a fine
example of just that. The Golden sample cards are Gainward's top
of the line except for the Cool FX series which are water cooled.
Golden Sample graphic cards from Gainward mean that the graphics core
and memory are hand picked to ensure you, that you are getting the
fastest, most stable and of course best performing samples available.
The reference Geforce 7800GTX core is clocked at 430 MHz and the memory
is clocked 1200 MHz. The Gainward 7800GTX Golden Sample core is clocked
at 480 MHz for the core and the memory is clocked at 1300 MHz. Yep you
read it right; this is the fastest air-cooled Geforce 7800GTX card
clocked at 480/1300. Memory bandwidth reaches 41.6GB/second. And the
best part is that you are under warranty from Gainward at that speed.
| Specification | G70 | NV40 | | Memory Interface | 256 bit | 256 bit | | Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec) | 38.4 (42 for Gainward) | 33.6 | | Fill Rate (billion
pixels/sec) | 10.32 | 6.4 | | Vertices per second
(million) | 860 | 600 | | Pixels per clock (peak) | 24 | 16 | | Ramdac (MHz) | 400 | 400 |
Roughly a month ago nVidia raised the bar once again and released their
new high end graphics card. The most shocking part was that the Geforce
7800GTX was available at retail outlets the same day they announced it.
This is a much better approach then the paper product launches we have
been seeing from both ATI and nVidia. The codename for this card is G70
which was first discovered in the leaked Forceware driver 75.90 a few
months ago. The G70 is now the fastest card available and so far
it's available only in PCI-E format. According to nVidia (at the
time of this review) they don't have any current plans to release
an AGP version.
When the official specification hit the web, many
people thought that a 30 MHz increase on the core and a jump to 24
pipes instead of 16 wouldn't make a huge difference. Boy were
they ever wrong. The 7800GTX has 302 millions transistors compared to
the 222 million the 6800 Ultra has. The 7800GTX is manufactured on a
0.11 micron fabrication process and has 8 vertex shaders compared to 6
on the 6800 Ultra. According to nVidia the 7800GTX is completely
redesigned from scratch. Instead of just increasing the core and
memory, nVidia increased the shader performance. It is now 2 times more
powerful than the 6800 Ultra, and nVidia knows that games are beginning
to make use of the raw shader power available to them.
Scalable Link Interface (SLI)
SLI is a method for linking two (or possibly more) video cards together
to produce a single output. Back in 1998 3dfx introduced a technology
called Scan Line Interleave and was used in the Voodoo 2 line of
graphics technology. With the introduction of the NV40 nVidia
reintroduced the technology in 2004 and of course G70 supports this
technology.
With SLI, it is possible to roughly double the amount of graphic power
by adding a second video card. A single GPU is supported by an x16 PCIe
slot, which can be reprogrammed to two x8 PCIe slots to support two
video cards in SLI mode. The Forceware drivers distribute the workload
in 2 ways, SFR (Split Frame Rendering this splits the workload 50/50
between the 2 GPU's and AFR (Alternate Frame Rendering) where one
GPU processes the current frame, and the next frame is processed by the
second card.
Shader Model 3.0
Shader Model 3.0 is the latest DirectX 9 has to offer. Shader Model 3.0
introduced Vertex Texture Fetch, Geometry Instancing, and Dynamic
Branching to name a few. There is also HDR (High Dynamic Range
Rendering) which more games now support. The first game to support
Shader Model 3.0 and HDR was FarCry, with HDR FarCry became almost a
new game considering how realistic it looked but the performance hit
was quite often big. With the new 7800GTX, nVidia has improved HDR
performance compared to the 6800 Ultra.
Most games that have been developed in the past year have support for
Shader Model 3.0 and have most likely had nVidia hardware during their
development. NVidia stands alone on that front as ATI chose not to
implement Shader Model 3.0 in their previous generation of cards.
It certainly adds more realism to your games with HDR enabled and the
Gainward 7800GTX Golden Sample enhances your gaming experience to the
maximum. More games are beginning to take advantage of HDR rendering.
Titles like the new Splinter Cell, Unreal Tournament 2007 and the soon
to be released Half-Life 2 Lost Coast map just to name a few.
Intellisample 4.0
- Advanced 16x anisotropic filtering (with up to 128 Taps)
- Blistering-fast antialiasing and compression performance
- Gamma-adjusted rotated-grid antialiasing removes jagged edges
for incredible image quality
- Transparency multisampling and transparency supersampling modes
boost antialiasing quality to new levels
- Support for normal map compression
- Support for advanced lossless compression algorithms for colour,
texture, and z-data at even higher resolutions and frame rates
- Fast z-clear
Features wise the 7800GTX now supports two new antialiasing modes,
transparency adaptive supersampling and transparency adaptive
multisampling which according to nVidia increase the quality and
performance of antialiasing.
Transparency adaptive supersampling and multisampling take additional
Texel samples and antialiasing passes to enhance the quality of
thin-lined objects such as chain link fences, trees, and vegetation.
These types of objects are generally rendered on very simple polygon
models (or even one polygon). The complexity of the final image (a
group of branches or vegetation) comes from the texture that is mapped
onto the polygon. Conventional antialiasing does not help this
situation, because the edges of the vegetation or branches are actually
inside the projected texture. Pixels inside a polygon are not touched
by current antialiasing methods.
Transparency adaptive multisampling also improves antialiasing
quality-with even higher levels of performance because one Texel
sample is used to calculate surrounding sub pixel values. Although
transparency adaptive multisampling is not as high quality as the
supersampling method, its increased efficiency balances improved image
quality and high levels of performance. The visual improvements of
adaptive supersampling are obvious when compared to generic
supersampling/multisampling approaches.
Now, I won't look through fences without Transparency
Supersampling again. There are no jaggies what so ever, and you
won't face a massive performance hit. Most of the time Gainward
7800GTX Golden Sample has very high frame rates and to lose a few fps
when playing at 80-100 frames per second is not something you are going
to notice; however if you chose not to enable TAA, bad looking fences
are one thing you will notice. Look ahead to the following pages where
I benchmark the different AA modes the new Gainward 7800GTX has to
offer.
Notice the improved image quality on the bush in front of Jack, no more
jaggies on the bush.
CineFX 4.0
- Vertex Shaders
o Support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Vertex Shader 3.0
o Displacement mapping
o Geometry instancing
o Infinite length vertex programs
- Pixel Shaders
o Support for DirectX 9.0 Pixel Shader 3.0
o Full pixel branching support
o Support for Multiple Render Targets (MRTs)
o Infinite length pixel programs
- Next-Generation Texture Engine
o Accelerated texture access
o Up to 16 textures per rendering pass
o Support for 16-bit floating point format and 32-bit floating
point format
o Support for non-power of two textures
o Support for sRGB texture format for gamma textures
o DirectX and S3TC texture compression
- Full 128-bit studio-quality floating point precision
through the entire rendering pipeline with native hardware support for
32bpp, 64bpp, and 128bpp rendering modes
According to nVidia the new CineFX 4.0 engine includes support for
Microsoft's Longhorn using the Windows Graphics Foundation 1.0;
CineFX 4.0 also supports Ultrashadow II a feature NV 40 introduced
about 15 months ago.
PureVideo
- Adaptable programmable video processor
- High-definition MPEG-2 and WMV9 hardware acceleration
- Spatial-temporal de-interlacing
- Inverse 2:2 and 3:2 pull-down (Inverse Telecine)
- 4-tap horizontal, 5-tap vertical scaling
- Overlay color temperature correction
- Microsoft Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) supports
multiple video windows with full video quality and features in each
window
- Integrated HDTV output
The 7800GTX has the built in PureVideo engine and its upgraded from the
previous generation; it now supports de-interlacing with HD resolutions
up to 1080i. NVidia also added support for inverse 2:2 pull down
enabling you to enjoy your movies at a better quality. The PureVideo
engine is programmable and will make new video features easier to
implement and will be able to support new video formats through driver
updates, the 7800GTX supports WMV-HD decode acceleration that can
offload video decoding from the CPU onto the GPU up 40%.
Power
We all remember the Geforce 6800 Ultra and its power supply demands.
nVidia recommended a 350W minimum power supply for the previous
generation top of the line card. This time around nVidia claims that
the 7800GTX uses less power. The 7800GTX has 80 million more
transistors and yet it draws less power than the 6800 Ultra. The best
part is that's it's a single slot design. If you decide to
buy another 7800GTX and run them in SLI mode, then nVidia recommends
jumping to a 500W power supply unit.
Temperature
The Gainward 7800GTX Golden Sample card is a single slot design but
that doesn't mean that cooling is going to be sacrificed. I
measured the temperatures with the latest version of Riva tuner.
At idle the Gainward 7800GTX is
operating at 45 Degrees C
At full load the temperature is between 71-74 Degrees C, which is
normal for these high end cards. The noise the fan make is non
existent, I tried hard to listen but the fan wasn't audible. The
cooling solution is truly amazing considering how powerful the Gainward
7800GTX Golden Sample is.
The Package
The box is big and very flashy with a big golden sticker on the left
side of the box and the nice looking girl.
 
The Package includes:
* Quick Start Manual
* Muvee Auto Producer 3
* Cyberlink Power DVD 5
* Gainward Power CD - VGA Drivers, Expert Tool, Bios Flash
Utilities, Acrobat Reader
* 2 x DVI to VGA Converters
* 1 x S-Video to RCA Connector
* 1 x PCI-E Power Converter
The bundle isn't anything to get excited about. I'm sure
Gainward could have provided a game or two with the 7800GTX but what
really matters is the incredible performance Gainward offers.
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