Fall '06 NVIDIA GPU Refresh - Part I: GeForce 7900 GS
by Derek Wilson on September 6, 2006 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
XFX Card and Competitors
XFX's card comes slightly overclocked, so in order to provide a look at standard 7900 GS performance we used the Coolbits registry tweak and forced the card to stock clock speeds. We will include both the stock and overclocked results in our performance testing. The 480M Extreme comes with a 480MHz core clock and a 700MHz (1400MHz data rate) memory clock. Here's a quick look at the XFX card.
While the sleek black PCB and XFX logo will obviously be different depending on the manufacturer, we can expect the same basic card design to carry over to other manufacturers. It should come as little surprise that the 7900 GS PCB is identical to the 7900 GT PCB, as is the heatsink. By sticking with the same circuit board, NVIDIA is able to keep board costs down as well as decrease the time to market.
All of the features for the 7900 GS are also the same as the 7900 GT. PureVideo/PureVideo HD are supported, up to XHD resolutions (2560x1600) are possible, Shader Model 3.0, HDR, transparency antialiasing, and SLI support are all features of the G70/71/73 series of GPUs. HDCP support is also available, but the actual implementation is left up to the card manufacturers. In order to take advantage of HDCP output, you will need a card with an HDCP chip, an HDCP monitor, and a media player that supports the standard (InterVideo and CyberLink both have players available for Windows XP, while Microsoft will wait for Windows Vista to include built in HDCP support).
As we mentioned, this is a very crowded market and there's definitely overlap between many of the products offered. In order to help keep things straight, we've created a table showing the features and specifications of the various cards we will be testing, along with the 7950 GT which we will test in the near future.
| NVIDIA Graphics Card Specifications | ||||||||
Vert Pipes |
Pixel Pipes |
Raster Pipes |
Core Clock |
Mem Clock |
Mem Size (MB) |
Mem Bus (bits) |
Price |
|
| GeForce 7950 GX2 | 8x2 |
24x2 |
16x2 |
500x2 |
600x2 |
512x2 |
256x2 |
$600 |
| GeForce 7900 GTX | 8 |
24 |
16 |
650 |
800 |
512 |
256 |
$450 |
| GeForce 7950 GT | 8 |
24 |
16 |
550 |
700 |
512 |
256 |
$300-$350 |
| GeForce 7900 GT | 8 |
24 |
16 |
450 |
660 |
256 |
256 |
$280 |
| GeForce 7900 GS | 7 |
20 |
16 |
450 |
660 |
256 |
256 |
$200-$250 |
| GeForce 7600 GT | 5 |
12 |
8 |
560 |
700 |
256 |
128 |
$160 |
| GeForce 7600 GS | 5 |
12 |
8 |
400 |
400 |
256 |
128 |
$120 |
| GeForce 7300 GT | 4 |
8 |
2 |
350 |
667 |
128 |
128 |
$100 |
| GeForce 7300 GS | 3 |
4 |
2 |
550 |
400 |
128 |
64 |
$65 |
| ATI Graphics Card Specifications | ||||||||
Vert Pipes |
Pixel Pipes |
Raster Pipes |
Core Clock |
Mem Clock |
Mem Size (MB) |
Mem Bus (bits) |
Price |
|
| Radeon X1950 XTX | 8 |
48 |
16 |
650 |
1000 |
512 |
256 |
$450 |
| Radeon X1900 XTX | 8 |
48 |
16 |
650 |
775 |
512 |
256 |
$375 |
| Radeon X1900 XT | 8 |
48 |
16 |
625 |
725 |
256/512 |
256 |
$280/$350 |
| Radeon X1900 GT | 8 |
36 |
12 |
525 |
600 |
256 |
256 |
$230 |
| Radeon X1650 Pro | 5 |
12 |
4 |
600 |
700 |
256 |
128 |
$99 |
| Radeon X1600 XT | 5 |
12 |
4 |
590 |
690 |
256 |
128 |
$150 |
| Radeon X1600 Pro | 5 |
12 |
4 |
500 |
400 |
256 |
128 |
$100 |
| Radeon X1300 XT | 5 |
12 |
4 |
500 |
400 |
256 |
128 |
$89 |
| Radeon X1300 Pro | 2 |
4 |
4 |
450 |
250 |
256 |
128 |
$79 |
The 7900 GS is identical to the stock 7900 GT in clock speeds. The difference is that it comes with one less vertex pipeline and four fewer pixel pipelines. It also comes with an MSRP of $199 compared to $299 for the 7900 GT, so while it may offer slightly lower performance, the difference in price appears likely to make it a more attractive card for many people. In raw pixel processing power, the additional pipelines make the 7900 GT potentially up to 20% faster, which is in line with the price difference we expect to see. We will take a closer look at how the GT compares to the GS later to see if this approximation is accurate.
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munky - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link
FEAR is a DX9 game, not OpenGL...
DerekWilson - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link
I'm looking into this at the moment but having trouble finding documentation on it.I suppose, as I was recently testing quad sli and saw huge performance increases, I assumed the game must be using the 4 frame afr mode only possible in opengl (dx is limited to rendering 3 frames ahead). I'll keep looking for confirmation on this ...
MemberSince97 - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link
Jupiter EX is a DX9 rendering engine...DerekWilson - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link
corrected, thanks ... now I have to figure out why FEAR likes quad sli so much ...MemberSince97 - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link
Nice writeup DW, I really like the mouseover performance % graphs...PrinceGaz - Thursday, September 7, 2006 - link
So do I, but there is one errorThat should be 14% and 25% advantages
The 7900GS has 20 PS while the 7900GT has 24 PS. That makes the 7900GS 20% slower than the 7900GT, but it makes the 7900GT 25% faster than the 7900GS. It's important to remember which one you're comparing it against when quoting percentages.
Hopefully the percentage performance difference in the graph itself was calculated correctly, or at least consistently.
PrinceGaz - Thursday, September 7, 2006 - link
Ooops sorry, please ignore my post. For some reason I thought for a moment the 7900GS had 16 PS and the 7900GT had 20 PS (despite writing the correct values in my comment). The article is correct, I was just getting confused.PS. an edit function would be nice.
Frackal - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link
There is no way an X1900xt gets 75fps at 1600x1200 4xAA, at that same resolution and AA setting I get well over 120-130fps average with an X1900xtx. Most sites show it hitting at least 100+DerekWilson - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link
if you use the built in demo features to run a timedemo with dice's own calculations you will get a very wrong (skewed upward) number. Dice themselves say that results over 100 fps aren't reliable.the problem is that they benchmark the load screen, and generally one card or the other will get better load screen performance -- for instance, the x1900 gt may get 300+fps while the 7900 gt may only get 200fps. (I just picked those numbers, but framerates for the load screen are well over 100 fps in most cases and drastically different between manufacturers).
not only does no one care about this difference on a load screen, but it significantly interferes with benchmark numbers.
the timedemo feature can be used to output a file with frametimes and instantaneous frames per second. we have a script that opens this file, removes the frame data for the load screen, and calculates a more accurate framerate average using only frame data for scenes rendered during the benchmark run.
this will decrease over all scores.
we also benchmark in operation clean sweep which has a lot of fog and water. we use a benchmark with lots of smoke and explosions and we test for some ammount of time in or near most vehicles.
splines - Wednesday, September 6, 2006 - link
Ownage approved.